


Afterburn

by Elsby72



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Algae! - Freeform, Bellarke, Character Development, Endgame Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Failing bechdel all over this joint, Friendship, I acknowledge that the S5 finale made up for a lot, Long, Romance, Slow Burn, blinded with science, don't hate echo hate the writers, endgame bellarke, romaaaaaance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-06-21 23:44:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 76,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15568995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsby72/pseuds/Elsby72
Summary: "Bellamy was scared. He had thought, a million times, of what he would give to have just five more minutes with her. He knew that his soul was tarnished – more tarnished than it had been already – by the dark deals he had offered the devil to get her back. But now that she was in front of him, he realized that he should have been more specific.Because if these were his five minutes – if what he had been given was only one more chance to lose her, to prove that he would never be able to protect her when it really counted – he knew that he wouldn't be able to survive it. This would be how Earth killed him at last."Post Praimfaya/Space: in which action occurs, Clarke and Bellamy are reunited and work some shit out, Echo is redeemed, Raven is Raven and Murphy is Murphy, our heroes have much angst and some joy, and no character is assassinated.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a multi-chapter story that takes off from the end of Season 4. It borrows the premise and some themes from Season 5, but only vaguely. It's kind of what could have happened if the writers hadn't insisted on CRUSHING MY HEART INTO THE DUST THIS SEASON by assassinating all of my favorite characters and relationships. It's endgame Bellarke but it might be a minute before we get there. Also I PROMISE I will finish but... again, it might be a minute until we get there. Don't lose faith.  
> Oh, also, I didn't try to make any of the science right. I mean, hydrazine ain't gonna regenerate in a closed system, I don't think. There will be so much scientific inaccuracy. I am not a scientist and I am just too lazy to do research. K have fun!  
> Edited to add: If all of season five had been as good and as true to character as the last two episodes I WOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO WRITE THIS but here we are.

Echo couldn't remember when the debate had started - maybe within a month of them getting on the ship. It wouldn't have started with Murphy or Emori: they were still walking on eggshells back then, every move oriented toward survival. Of course, they weren't the ones Bellamy had threatened to float. He may have been joking, but it had lingered in the back of Echo's mind for a long time, especially whenever John and Emori had shared a furtive, worried look. At least they were together in their belief that they were at the bottom of the food chain. Echo had been alone in her unease.

Monty or Raven, then, since Bellamy didn't have the knowledge and Harper didn't have the interest. At any rate, once it took hold, it kept coming back.

“If we can't find any other way...”

“We have five years, it won't come to that...." 

“But there _is_ always the hydrazine...”

Of course, there _was_ always the hydrazine. That was the only reason they were here in the first place. They wouldn't have returned to the Ark Ring if they hadn't known that they could make water. But now it had become a zero sum game – fuel or water. As long as the hydrazine was being used in the water generator, the byproducts would be recaptured in the closed system to make more hydrazine – which would then be used to make more water.

If they made the decision to use it for fuel, though, it was a one-way trip. No more water generator. No more water. No coming back.

“But we wouldn't need to.” John always argued both sides of the equation. Echo honestly couldn't tell what he actually wanted, but she imagined that when it came down to it, he would side with Emori, who wanted to stay. Spacekru may be family, but Emori was still everything to him. Even now.

Echo looked at Bellamy, who was staring out the viewfinder at their second pass of the east coast that day. He didn't appear to be listening. 

If only everyone were as transparent as John Murphy.

She gently covered his hand with hers. The start was so small, no one who knew him less well than she did would have noticed it. When his gaze found hers, though, he smiled with a warmth that flooded her with relief and reassurance. He was her Bellamy, again. Living out their days on the Ark, burning up in the atmosphere on The Princess, or somehow catapulting their way back down to the Ground, nothing could shake his devotion to her and the rest of the Kru. Why did she keep questioning that?

She forced herself to speak. “We would if it went wrong. If the takeoff didn't work, or if something went wrong during the flight and we made it back....” Even as she said it, she knew what the response would be. At this point, she knew Raven well enough to have entire debates with her in her own head.

“But that's the whole point. Once we initiated take-off, there would be no turning back.” Unlike when they had first started having this conversation, when it had been more of a way of passing the time than anything else, Raven's voice was now taught, thrumming with tension. “Emori is right. If we go, we need to really understand that we only get one shot.”

Though she said it, she had already made her position clear. As soon as the fifth year had begun, her search for an alternative source of fuel had reached such a fevered pace that Echo had worried that Becca was eating away her brain again. Raven had explained that she had gotten rid of Becca once and for all, but Echo knew that ghosts didn't always leave so easily.

So when, one night, Raven had come to the dinner table – an absurd practice, originated by Skaikru, of sitting at a table to choke down their algal preparation as a group – with a tired, defeated look on her face, Echo was at first unsure of who would speak: Raven, or Becca.

But there was no mistaking it when she opened her mouth. “We're floated,” she said, grimly. “All of us.”

Bellamy only frowned, silently, so Echo took over, as she had been doing more and more lately, as he had seemed to fade more and more into himself. “What are you talking about?”

“I've tried everything. I mean _everything_. Things that were far beyond the technology even of the first Ark; things I never would have known about if it weren't for Becca. The fact is, we just don't have the knowledge to find an alternative fuel source – and if we did, we don't have the tools to harvest it.”

“So we're stuck here.” Emori's voice was flat, but Echo thought she detected something just underneath it. “For good.” Relief? It sounded how Echo felt, and she didn't like it. Azgeda warriors didn't hide from danger.

“Unless we use the hydrazine.” Harper spoke quickly, as if she wanted to get it over with.

“Harper, we can't be impulsive.” Monty often took this tone with them these days – patient and chiding. It made Echo want to scream. Now, she suddenly realized why it bothered her so much. It was a hollow imitation of the gentle insistence that Bellamy had used so many times to bring one of them back to themselves when they were losing it.

“Impulsive? We've been talking about this for five years.” Of everyone, Monty least deserved for her to snap at him, but she couldn't help it. Monty acting like Imitation Bellamy was just a painful reminder of how badly they needed the real Bellamy to step up. “We can't keep going back and forth like this. We take a vote, now, and stick with the decision.”

Raven swallowed and winced. After all of this time, she was the only one who hadn't gotten used to the rank taste of the algae. “So what, if we vote to stay, that's it? We live out the rest of our lives and die on this fucking ship?” She looked around the table. “Bell? Hey. Bell. Is that really what we fought for? Is that what Clarke _died_ for?”

It hit Echo like a gut punch, but not because Raven was arguing to leave. It was because she knew, as Raven had, that bringing Clarke into the conversation was the one thing that would make Bellamy care about it.

He looked up. “No. Clarke died to keep us alive. If we throw ourselves into space on a suicide mission, then she died for nothing.” Echo could recite the rest of the sentence by heart. “And I won't let that happen.”

It hadn't always been like this. When they first – she never knew what to call it. It had felt so inevitable. She just fit with him, as surely as Emori fit with John and Harper with Monty. When it finally happened, the only acknowledgment in the group of the change had been a brief, warm squeeze on the shoulder from Raven, reassuring Echo that she was OK with it. That Echo was part of the family, not some usurper.

Usurping what, anyway? It had never been like that between Clarke and Bell. And anyway, Echo reminded herself fiercely, Clarke was dead. _Long_ dead. She had died on the ground so that the rest of them could live.

At first, that was exactly what it had felt like: Clarke had died, and the rest of them were living. Sometimes, when she and Bell were together, the silence would wrap around them like the galaxy itself, and it genuinely felt like they were the last two people in the world. She knew that he felt it too, because in those moments, he would look at her and smile a tiny, relieved smile that mirrored how she felt exactly. They had made it. They had found each other, and nothing could take that away.

Clarke still haunted them - all of them - but she was a ghost Echo could live with. She had sacrificed herself for them, so Echo felt that it was right when, twice a day when they drifted past the east coast, no matter where Bell was on the ship, he would look up like an animal with a scent; that in the night, sometimes, he would shake and cry himself half awake, Clarke's name on his lips; that some things were never spoken of between them, ever. It was only right that Echo didn't have all of him. She owed Clarke that, and besides, after everything she had done to them, it was a miracle that he loved her at all. She didn't need to possess his whole heart. She left some of it on the altar in his mind - in all of their minds - in tribute to Clarke, the girl who died so that she, Echo, might live to be this happy.

But Clarke was a demanding ghost, and Bellamy had started to sink into himself almost as soon as the fifth year came and went with no solution for getting to the Ground. In spite of his comment at the dinner table, she knew that he was thinking about it nearly all the time. She heard him speaking in hushed tones with Raven late into the night, arguing with Monty in the aquafarm. Usually, with something like this on his mind, he would think about it out loud with Echo first, and only then bring his conclusions to the others. But whenever he was alone with her and she tried to bring it up, weighing out the pros and cons – she was far from decided, herself, at the time – he simply changed the subject.

That was when she knew that his hesitation, his staring out of viewfinders and arguments with Monty and Raven, weren't about the Kru at all, or even about survival. There was only one no-go topic between Bellamy and Echo.

If there was a reason he didn't want to go to the ground, it was Clarke. 

****************

Madi couldn't remember when the debate had started, but she must have been very young. Even so, she always won. She wondered why Clarke bothered to go through the motions anymore.

“You are staying with the Rover.”

“I am not.”

“Madi, we don't have time for this. That was a ship I've never seen before, and you're safest in the Rover, at least until we find out what it is.”

“I'm safest with _you_ , and you're safest with me. That's what you always say.” This was Madi's trump card. It always melted Clarke's resolve. She usually tried to build to it a bit more slowly, throwing in a pout here and there, but as Clarke had pointed out, they were running short on time.

“That's cute, but you're still staying here. I'm taking the rifle; you keep everything else loaded and ready to go. If I'm not back within an hour, you drive. Understand? Get to the art store.”

“The art store? But I'm... Clarke, I'm not allowed to go there alone.” Madi was still stunned that her trump card hadn't worked. She didn't process the absurdity of reciting this rule to the person who had made it.

Clarke briefly drew Madi close and kissed the top of her sleep-warmed head. “You can find it without me, right?”

“Yes.” _Maybe_.

“Through the Red Waste, keep the bunker to your left all the time. You'll see it. I know you can do it.”

“But I won't have to, right? You'll be back?”

“Of course I'll be back. This is just in case.”

“Clarke? Maybe it's your friends. Maybe they found a different ship. A _better_ ship.”

“Maybe.” Madi recognized the tone. It was the same one Clarke used to tell her stories at night. _There is a ship sailing the stars where seven special people live. There is a land underground from which a wonderful, kind healer will emerge someday. There once was a land in the forest ruled over by your kinswoman and she lives on in the stars, in the ground, in our blood._

_Maybe this ship holds friends. Maybe this ship will not kill us._

Madi clutched the semi-automatic more tightly in her lap. The firing mechanism had been jamming lately, but it would get off at least a few shots. Hopefully it would be enough. Clark shouldered the her own rifle and turned to go, the familiar motion that Madi knew so well. She had to hold herself back from falling in line behind. They weren't going hunting or to the training grounds today; they weren't going to the river for water or back to Arcadia to stock up on supplies. For the first time in five years, Clarke would be more than shouting distance away from her.

She felt the panic well up in her, nearly blocking her throat. “Clarke-” she started, then - “Mom.”

Clarke paused, but didn't turn. Her own voice was as steady as the set of her shoulders. “I'll be back soon.” Only then did she turn to meet Madi's wide eyes. “And Madi, if you do go to the Store...”

“I know.” Madi flicked the safety off and then back on, testing her speed with it. “I'll bring the guns.”

****************

There were weapons on the Ark, and Bellamy had insisted that everyone keep up with their training: target practice, weapons drills, and hand-to-hand combat training with Echo. Everyone was required to attend at least once a week, but most of them came more often, and she was kept busy in the improvised gym that they'd set up in the center of the old Sky Box. Even Raven learned to use her brace to her advantage when facing an enemy on the field.

Echo didn't know if it was just to keep everyone from going crazy, or whether Bell really believed that when they got back to the Ground, there would be anyone left for them to kill. Either way, she enjoyed kicking his ass on the regular. He had improved as a fighter under her training, but not so much that she didn't still win more matches than she lost.

In the old days, getting physical with him was always fun, no matter how it happened. These days, it was more often a way for her to take out her frustration with him for being so goddamn distant and depressed all the time.

He never won anymore. It almost took the fun out of beating him. _Almost._

“Are you going to tell me?” He was down again, and she was barely breathing hard.

“Tell you what?” He struggled to his hands and knees in time to catch her foot in his ribs, and was back down.

“What you really think about making the trip back down. Since you don't have a problem talking it through with every – other – goddamn – person – on – this ship.” Planting her knees on either side of his torso so that she was pinning his arms, she punctuated her words with blows to his ribs.

“E, I don't know what you're talking about.”

Disgusted, she got off of him and threw him a towel. In addition to the ammunition, another thing that they had almost limitless supplies of was scraps of cloth and linens, and she never grew tired of the luxury of dirtying fresh laundry, much to Murphy's vocal chagrin when he was on laundry duty. “Fine. Get up and don't come back here until you're ready to take training seriously.”

“Echo, what's your problem with me?” He wiped the blood and sweat from his eyes, frowning in her direction with a slightly wounded look. She hated when he looked wounded. It was his most effective weapon, and he didn't even know it.

“My problem? Are you serious?” She held out her hand to haul him to his feet, more an assault than an offer of aid. “My problem is that yesterday afternoon I heard you ask John “Cockroach” Murphy what he thinks about the hydrozene question.”

“You know none of us think of him that way any-”

“My problem is that when we all get together to try to hash this out, because we actually give a fuck about the survival of the human race and, you know, about each other, you're dead silent, because you're too busy making puppy eyes out the viewfinder at the earth. My problem is that you used to be a leader on this ship and now you're acting helpless.” She took a deep, shaky breath, hating herself for saying it, hating him for making her feel it. “My fucking problem, Bellamy, is that I'm scared, and I need you, and the only person you haven't bothered talking to about this is also the person who really, really needs to talk to _you_ about it.”

Except that she didn't. She already knew what she wanted. To grow old with him, like this, on this stupid ring, spending their days fighting and eating algae and figuring out how to get out of laundry duty. To die together, looking out at the stars. She only needed to know that he wanted the same thing.

She had hit him many times, but he had never looked at her like this before – wide-eyed and stricken. “Echo.” She couldn't bear it. Having him know how much he meant to her, not knowing whether she meant anything at all to him anymore. She had to go.

“Never mind.”

“I can't talk to you about it because I can't let myself care.” The words were rushed, and didn't make sense, and she was too hurt to let herself believe that they had the power to make anything better; but she stayed, because in the end, he would always have the power to keep her from walking away.

She turned back, wearily. “The fuck are you talking about, Blake?”

He looked so weary she almost felt sorry for him. _Almost._

“If I knew what you wanted, I would care. And then I might make the wrong choice.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “They listen to me, you know? I don't know why, anymore. I mean, Raven knows more than I do about … everything. And Monty is more level-headed, he probably makes better decisions than me. I don't know why they look to me, but they do. So if I'm going to have an opinion, it has to be... unclouded.” He sat on the concrete, arms braced against his knees, as though literally weighted by the decision.

_Would Clarke have clouded you?_

But Clarke was a ghost. And Ice Nation warriors, while they respected the dead, did not live in fear of ghosts.

She placed her hand on his cheek, still wet with blood. His head wounds always bled so heavily. Always so dramatic in everything. He leaned into her hand and closed his eyes, briefly, before she drew it away. “I will make my own choice, and you will make yours. We will cast our vote with the others, and then we will live or die with the consequences.”

When she walked away from him, he remained in the center of the floor, alone and still. Like something broken.

****************

Clarke followed the movement through the sight of the rifle. One, two – three? No, just two. Two figures were patrolling the ramp to the ship. It was an old, outdated model, but some of the tech – like the weapons they were holding casually braced against their shoulders – looked a bit newer, and very well-maintained.

They were also wearing full radiation suits, meaning she couldn't see any identifying features. Was that a curl of dark hair? She couldn't see from here... one of them definitely was very tall, but thinner than Bellamy. Still, she didn't know what 6 years in space might have done to him.

She didn't mean to step on the branch, and the Clarke of six years ago would have been more cautious. But this Clarke hadn't seen another human being, except for Madi, in so many years that she had forgotten the habit of being afraid all of the time. There wasn't even any big game left to stay silent for. So when she shifted her weight, and the twig broke open the dry air like a gunshot, there was no cushioning or mistaking the sound.

When their weapons found her, she dropped her rifle and put her hands up almost immediately. Later, she would admit to herself that at that point she still had hope that the slight figure could have been Raven, or even Murphy; that the tall, stooped figure might have been a worn-down version of the one she had sketched over and over again, until Madi asked her to draw something else for a change.

She should have run, or at least fought back. But she didn't. And when she stepped into the clearing with her hands up, and saw the faces behind the radiation suits, there was no fooling herself any longer. These were no friends of hers.

****************

Bellamy was tired.

He was tired of being wrong. He had been wrong to let Clarke go alone to the satellite dish instead of sending her after Monty and going to the dish himself. It had been clear what the more dangerous job was, and he had let her take it.

Before that, he had been wrong about following Pike. He had been wrong about destroying the radio that Raven brought down from the Ark. Hell, maybe he had been wrong to come down from the Ark in the first place. Octavia might have been better off without his “protection,” and he could have sacrificed himself with the rest of Section 5. Who might be alive now if he had done so?

He was tired, too, of missing people. All day, every goddamn day. The ones who would never come back: Jasper, before the world poisoned him. Finn, when he still believed that they could do better than the people who had come before. Gina, who had deserved so much more than the half-hearted love and fiery death that Bellamy had given her.

Somehow worse was the pain about the ones who might still be alive. Kane. Bellamy heard his voice in his head all the time, with every decision he made. If he could go back in time and tell himself how badly he would end up needing the man who had floated his mother …

But that was the point, wasn't it? Every time the world changed, it became unrecognizable to the him who had inhabited the one before. Could he have ever imagined that he would have left his sister in a bunker underground while he went to live in the stars, after sacrificing everything to get down there to be with her in the first place? Or, when he first stowed away on the ship, that he could ever feel as fiercely protective of another family as he had towards her - that his family could ever be larger than just the two of them?

It should give him hope – that there were infinite lives for Bellamy Blake to live, infinite chances at redemption. Instead, it just reminded him there were infinite losses ahead that he could not even begin to anticipate. Because every time the world tore itself apart and stitched itself back together again, a few more pieces of himself seemed to have been lost in the rift.

And because Octavia and Kane and Finn and Jasper weren't the only people the world had torn from him, and some losses were too searing to bear.

The first five years had been fine – good, even. He had lived around the absence, stepping carefully, not allowing himself to plunge too deep. He lived each day by asking himself what she would have wanted for him, and that was how he kept from shutting himself down, pushing people away so that he would never have to survive another loss like that. That was how he had allowed himself to love Echo. He repeated it to himself like a prayer - _head and heart, head and heart_. If he shut down his heart, as he had wanted so badly to do in that first year, he would be letting her down. She would have died for nothing.

And he couldn't let that happen.

So he did it. He orbited the pain like a sun, but didn't let it swallow him whole. And quietly, guiltily, he began to feel happy for the first time in a long time. For the first time since he was eight years old, he no longer had to think about Octavia's safety in every decision he made. His only responsibility now was to himself and his SpaceKru. He had a family, a woman who loved him more than he deserved, and Clarke … well, he had done what she would have wanted. He was trying to make her proud. He may not have been able to protect her, as he had promised himself he would, and he may not ever be able to get the better of the pain of losing her, but he could damned sure make her proud by living a good life.

Then year five came and went, and the Ground became real to him in a way that it hadn't been almost since the moment the hangar doors closed, leaving Clarke on the other side. Every day was the day that the bunker might open, that Octavia and the rest of their friends – if any of them had made it – would emerge from beneath the earth. And suddenly, running beneath his every though was the radioactive possibility that the nightblood treatment had worked – that Clarke, against all hope, had survived.

The dreams, when they came, weren't always bad. It was so good to hear her voice - It somehow made him feel like himself again. Even better, he could see her – not as she had been, but as she would be now, five years later. Her hair was shorter, and her face looked … not older, exactly, but more lived in. Knowing.

And she was talking to him. Telling him things, nothing and everything, about her life down there.

“We found a rabbit. Not much, I know, but the biggest game I've seen around here since Praimfaya, so we were excited. By the time we cooked it, it was down to nothing... still. Big day, right?”

“Day 1,925.... and still doing this. You could be down here with me, you know. Yesterday we hiked 12 miles and found nothing. No game, no supplies, no signs of life. See what you're missing? Find a fuel source and come home, Bellamy.”

He didn't know who “we” was. Maybe his subconscious just didn't want her to be alone.

“Day … I don't know. I'll look it up and tell you tomorrow, when I do this again, which I will, because I will do this until the day I die, which better be long before the day you die, because I need you to be alive up there. I look up at the stars and I _know_ you are up there. If you aren't... I don't know. I don't know what any of this is for if you aren't up there. I can't explain that. Whether you guys made it or not, it doesn't change that it's just me and her down here, every day, maybe forever. I know that keeping her safe should be enough … but I really need you to be out there too, you know? I really need you to be alive.

And hey, happy, if possible, OK? Sometimes I think... I worry that you think you need my forgiveness. For leaving. I would have killed you if you'd stayed - you know that, right? You don't need forgiveness, Bellamy, so I'm not giving it to you. Just be alive. Whether or not you ever come home. Stay alive.”

That had been a bad one. Sometimes, he tried to reply, or would even begin to cry with the desperation of not being able to reach her. When that happened, Echo would be there, her arms around him, and he would let her believe that he was drifting back to sleep. There was no need for her to know that waking up was like losing Clarke all over again, the hangar doors closing, the fire sweeping her away. It would only hurt her, and he was hurting enough for both of them.

When the rest of the Kru began to talk seriously about using the hydrozine to get back to Ground, he kept quiet and kept out of it. He listened to what they said, asked their opinions, tried to get a feel for what would be best for the group. And when he knew no one was near, he talked to her about it. The Her that he was always carrying with him. 

_What are you doing, Bellamy? You guys are good up there._

_I'm_ not good. 

_You could be. You have it better than either of us ever dreamed was possible. We did it, Bell. We made it. We saved our people._

But I couldn't save you. You're not up here with us. 

_So what? I'm probably not down here either, remember. And you're safe. Have you really forgotten what it's like down here? Keep them safe, Bellamy. What do you think I sent you up there for?_

But _you're_ not safe down there without me. 

_Like I was safe with you? There is no safe here, Bell. What did I tell you on the last day?_

To use my head, not just my heart. 

_What is your head telling you?_

That there may be no one down there. That I may be in charge of the survival of the last of our people.  _Your_ people. That I owe it to you to keep them alive.

_We bear it so they don't have to, Bellamy. Don't have a fucking vote. Tell them what to do. Make the choice. They need that from you._

What if I can't bear this? 

_Then I died for nothing._

And I can't let that happen. 

When the conversation got too real, he looked out the viewfinder and tried to be somewhere else before he went completely insane. Because the reality was, sometimes he didn't want to end the conversations in his head. Imaginary Her was better than no Her at all.  

Echo had finally figured it out. He got off watch one evening and climbed into bed beside her to find her, still awake and watchful.

“You want to go.” He had never heard her voice so flat. It was much scarier than the many, many times she had held swords to his throat.

“E, no. I don't... I don't know.”

“You think she might still be alive.”

“No.” _Please, yes._ “We've known all along what a long shot that would be.”

“But not such a long shot that you're not willing to risk everything we've built up here for it.”

“Echo, I'm not voting.”

“Why not?” She rolled over to face him, but her eyes weren't any warmer than her back had been. Azgeda. It had been a long time since he'd seen that look on her face.

And still longer since he had risen to the challenge. He tightened his jaw. “What do you want me to say? I'm not voting because I think people will listen to me. I'm not voting because I don't think it would be fair to influence things that way. I'm not voting because I want people to think what they think, not think that Bellamy Blake has some great plan. For the first time in almost eight years, we're safe. We could be safe up here forever, if we wanted. I'm not going to take that away from people just because I....”

She waited for the silence to age, grow old, and to die looking out at the stars.

Finally, she spoke. “That was not what I wanted you to say.”

“Well, what did you want?”

She rolled over again, leaving a space between them that he could have sworn was frosted over with actual ice. “The truth.”

****************

Monty was first, and voted to leave, decisively. “Not just survive, but live, remember?”

Harper avoided his eyes as she placed her stone in the other bowl. “I'm sorry. I want to survive _and_ live.” Monty shook his head and sighed, but Bellamy noticed that they never stopped holding hands. Could any relationship really be so placid?

Murphy clearly wanted to wait for Emori to vote first, but she wouldn't. Bellamy wondered if she was, like him, feeling conflicted about the amount of power she held. Finally, John threw his stone in the “stay” bowl so hard it nearly rebounded. “Screw it.” It wasn't his best one-liner, but Bellamy felt for him. He looked miserable.

Quietly and without fanfare, Emori placed her stone in the “stay” bowl. No surprise there. Bellamy started to relax. It would be out of his hands. With only Raven and Monty wanting to go, he couldn't sway the vote even if he wanted to. The ghost in his head would be at peace.

Raven huffed as she tossed her stone into the “leave” bowl. “Cowards.”

“I'm sorry, Raven.”

Raven rolled her eyes, but returned Harper's plaintive gaze with a tight smile. “Hey, we revisit the vote in another five years, right? That's the agreement.”

“Right.”

“No time at all.” But her voice had a defeated edge, and Bellamy thought about how many hits she'd taken since sacrificing everything to get to Earth and Finn, only to realize that he was already lost to her. And still, Earth hadn't been finished with her. It seemed to be a world with an insatiable appetite for sacrifice. He was grateful that the choice to go back there wouldn't be up to him.

He was looking down when Echo's stone made a soft clink against the side of a bowl.

He hadn't wanted her to tell him, but he had known just the same what her vote would be. She was happy here. He had been happy here, too. They could be happy again. He would make sure of it.

So he barely noticed the quick intake of breath, only glancing up briefly to say, “I abstain.”

“Bellamy.” Raven's voice was sharp. “You can't.”

He looked at the bowls. Three stones in each.

Echo had voted to leave.

Could he have been so wrong? No. He had known her for 6 years, loved her for almost that long. She had wanted to stay. Either she was so angry with him, so hurt, that she was willing to risk her own life, and the lives of their friends, to get away from this life with him, or.... 

She met his eyes across the table. Hers were still and cool as ever, but her hand still hovered over the bowl, as if she wished that she could take it back and cast the stone into the other one. _You can_ , he wanted to say. But of course, that wasn't true. A vote cast was a vote cast. And she had cast her vote for him: because if she wanted to leave, then he could tell himself that he was doing it for her. She could give him a reason to take them all to the Ground.

_She is doing this for you. Because she thinks you'll never be at peace until you know the truth about me. Tell her she's wrong._

No. I'm not going to start lying to her now.

It wasn't too late. He could quiet the ghost in his head, vote to stay, and keep his SpaceKru safe from the sacrificial fire that burned ceaselessly down below. Or he could gamble the survival of the human race on the chance that the ghost in his head wasn't a ghost, after all. 

Echo was already turning away by the time his stone bounced into the "leave" bowl. She had known all along that the world that they had painstakingly built for themselves - the peace that they had snatched back from the jaws of war - was about to be burned over in their own private Praimfaya. She didn't have to stand around and watch.

****************

The hour had come and gone, and still Madi didn't leave. She didn't let herself think that she was disobeying Clarke, exactly. It was more a variation on the “five more minutes” game she played when Clarke told her to do something that she didn't want to do, like go to bed. She couldn't ask for another hour, but usually Clarke was willing to give her five more minutes; and by asking for several “five more minutes” in a row, she could wheedle the full hour anyway.

So she kept telling herself that she would set off for the art store if Clarke weren't back in another five minutes, and then in another, and then in another hour, and then two, until finally the sun was going down and it was too late to set off for the art store anyway. She curled up in the Rover with her back to the opening. She knew that this was an unwise position, but it was the only way that she could see the drawings that Clarke had hung across both walls, the roof, and the backs of both of the seats. She faced her favorite set, of the seven friends in the sky, focusing fiercely on their faces.

Madi knew Clarke's friends like the back of her hand. The people they were – had been – came through, no matter how Clarke drew them. Whether tending to plants with his head cocked attentively as though he was listening to them, laughing with Raven, or gazing off into the horizon, Monty's eyes were soft, always. Madi didn't understand how someone could be so soft and not be destroyed, but Clarke said that Monty was one of the strongest people in this world or any other, and that was how.

Echo made more sense to her, but then, they were both Azgeda. She looked like the women Madi remembered from a long time ago – hard, and distant. Clarke said that Echo was different, and that she was braver than the others because she chose to trust, the way Clarke and Madi trusted each other. That didn't make any sense to Madi, so she ignored it, and looked at pictures of Echo when she wanted to remember her mother. Her first mother. It made something deep inside of her feel sad and safe at the same time.

Harper made sense, too – she looked the way Madi would expect someone like Monty to look if they weren't one of the strongest people in this world or any other: wounded and afraid. Clarke said that wasn't true, that Harper was also very brave and strong, and Madi didn't say anything about it, because Harper was Clarke's friend.

Other than Echo, Raven was Madi's favorite. She was the one that Clarke had drawn the most, except for Bellamy. There were pictures of her doing everything – laughing, talking, working, fixing things, thinking, looking angry. Her eyes were always alive. Clarke told Madi that she should try to grow up to be like Raven someday, that that would make Clarke happier than anything else Madi could ever do. Madi didn't tell her that she wanted to be like Clarke, because she knew, without knowing how she knew or why, that it would make Clarke sad for her to say that.

Murphy and Emori were interesting, but like a different species. They didn't have a clan and Clarke said they were family, but they didn't share blood. That didn't make sense to Madi, either, but she had given up asking Clarke about it.

The only one Madi didn't understand was Bellamy, and he was the one there was the most of. It made her uncomfortable, because his face and his eyes were always shifting, like Clarke didn't quite remember them right. Sometimes they were looking down, sometimes right out of the page with an intensity that scared Madi. Sometimes he was smiling, but when he was, it was always at someone else in the drawing – never directly out. It left Madi with the eerie impression that, of all of the group, he was the only one who had never smiled at her. So when she couldn't sleep at night, like now, and she played her game, he was always lurking in the corners, but he almost never spoke. Only when it was time to tell the others to go.

“I'm worried about her.” Harper was scared, as usual. Harper was always scared.

“She's fine.” Madi didn't mean to snap, but Harper got on her nerves sometimes. “It's Clarke. She's the strongest.”

She rolled over so that she was facing the drawing of John Murphy with his mouth quirked upwards, looking out from the page as though nothing in the world scared him. “Yeah,” he said. “We don't need to worry about Clarke. We need to worry about whatever it is she came across.”

Madi rolled again, this time facing a picture of Monty tending plants in a greenhouse, so his voice in her head was slightly distracted. “Maybe she's with us.”

Harper's voice was hopeful. “You think?” Then it fell again. “But if that's true, why would she stay away so long?”

John sounded amused. “She hasn't seen us in 6 years. Give her a minute to enjoy it, you know?”

Now Monty sounded unsure, too. “I don't know. I don't think she would leave Madi for this long, even if it was to hang out with us. Why wouldn't she just bring us to meet Madi?”

Harper sounded even more worried now. “Yes, that's true. She would do that first thing. She couldn't wait for us to meet Madi.”

John laughed. “That's what she _said_. But maybe she saw us and forgot all about Madi in the excitement. We were her best friends, after all. Madi's just some kid.”

“ _Her_ kid.” It was all Raven said this time, but her voice was fierce.

Emori rarely spoke, but when she did, her voice was hard and soft at the same time. “Not her real kid.”

There was a moment of silence, and then some of the other voices chimed in, murmuring in agreement. “That's true... not her real kid.”

Madi hoped that Raven would say something else, but instead Bellamy spoke from the corner, where a close-up of his face was looking down. “You really think that after she hasn't seen me for 6 years, she's going to walk away after one hour just to babysit you?” He gestured towards the stacks of drawings of himself, hidden under the Rover seats after Madi had made Clarke take them down, not telling her that they gave her nightmares. “What do you think all of these are for? Where are the pictures of you, Madi?”

Madi rolled over and tried to block out his voice. She stared, hard, through the blur in her eyes, at the only picture of Echo than hung in the Rover, a close-up of her face in Azgeda war paint. She had asked for Clarke to hang it where it would be right next to Madi's head while she slept, and she often dreamed of Echo.

“Is it true?” She whispered to Echo, so that Bellamy wouldn't hear.

“Does it matter?” Echo's voice was hard.

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Because I love Clarke.” Madi could hear her voice begin to rise and forced herself to calm down. She didn't want Echo to see her cry.

“What is love? Can you see it?”

“No.”

“Eat it? Does it keep you warm?”

“Clarke says it's the difference between surviving and living.”

Echo snorted, and Madi felt embarrassed. “Can you hold it to someone's throat and watch as it makes their blood spill?”

“No, but....”

“Then love isn't real. What is real?”

Madi was confused. Bellamy spoke. “Echo, stop wasting your time. It's time to go.”

“No, please, tell me. I'm sorry.” Madi tried to keep the desperation out of her voice. She hated Bellamy. She _hated_ him. He took everything. He was the reason Clarke disappeared with the radio every day and came back sad. He was the reason Clarke had left Madi for 12 hours instead of one.

Echo spoke quickly. “Would you die for Clarke?”

_Yes._

“Kill for her?”

_Yes._

“Then what is she?”

“She is my family.”

“No. What is she?”

A long pause, then Madi had it. “She is my clan.”

Echo sighed with relief, and Madi realized that she had felt as desperate as Madi to help before Bellamy made her leave. “Clarke has her reasons for being away from you. Does it matter what they are?”

“No.”

“A clan member has been taken from you. What do you do?”

 _I find her. I get her back._ And as soon as Madi thought the words, Echo was gone.

****************

Leaving the day after Unity Day had been Echo's idea, though she tried to pretend like it was Harper's, because the sentimentality of it embarrassed her. They had been ready two days earlier, and Raven had wanted to leave as soon as possible, but Echo wanted one last Unity Day on board.

It was silly, but Unity Day had become important to the Kru, even the Grounders. The first one had come six months after their return, and when the original Skaikru members explained Unity Day to the Grounders, they decided to celebrate because they hadn't had anything to celebrate in so long. Harper, Monty and Raven, with the help of Monty's new still, had even tried to perform the pageant for everyone, and for the first time in her life, Echo had laughed so hard that she was sore the next day.

From then on, they celebrated every year. Bellamy never understood why Echo wanted to, and she wasn't entirely sure, either. It was partly that, as she explained to him, this was her history, too. Just because the humans in space hadn't known about the humans on the ground didn't mean that they weren't there the whole time, fighting wars and performing their own versions of silly pageants. It was just coincidence that some of them took place among the stars.

But more than that, it was an anniversary for her. It was the first night they had all gotten drunk together, and that meant that it was the first night that she had let down her guard, completely, with anyone on the ship other than Bellamy. That was important to her. So if they were leaving all of that behind, she wanted to do it one last time.

Monty emptied his still and they all carried the jars, jugs and mugs into the cockpit, as usual, so that they could drink with the sight of the earth looming over them like an omen. In the past, it had made Echo feel close to her ancestors. Now it just made it impossible to forget what was coming tomorrow. Raven wasn't drinking, because she thought that at least one of them should be “sober enough to get our asses back to Earth,” as she put it. She and Monty were consulting about something in the corner, even though she had officially given him the night off. Bellamy had filled Jaha's old scotch bottle and had, as usual, brought it to the viewfinder to stare at the earth and stars. Murphy was drinking as though it was the last day of his life – which, Echo considered, it probably was. Raven rated the chances that any of them would survive the landing at about 78%, but their chances of a completely fatality-free landing was only 27%. When she had said that, Echo had tried to avoid immediately ranking them – the members of her family, of her  _clan_ – in terms of their preferred order of death. But then, Earth had a tendency to make you think that way.

“Earth skills.” She grinned at Emori, who was crouched next to her, as though the still were a fire to keep them warm. Emori had never lost her Grounder way of moving. Echo, in contrast, had felt right away that she had been born for space.

“What?” Emori glanced at Echo, clearly lost in her own thoughts. Well, tough. Echo wanted company in hers.

“It's a class they used to have to take on the Ark – Earth Skills. Bell told me about it. Hunting, tracking, that kind of thing. But those aren't the real Earth Skills, are they? Sacrifice, impossible choices, betrayal, murdering your friends. _Those_ are Earth Skills.”

“Fuck, E. That's dark.”

“Well? You voted to stay. There was a reason for it.”

“You voted to leave.” Emori snapped back. It was the first sign she had given that she had any hard feelings toward those who had outvoted her. “What was the reason for _that_?”

Echo sighed. “I don't know.” _Because if I voted to stay, he would never have forgiven me._ He didn't know it, but she did, and that was how weak she had become. How weak he had made her.

Time to change the subject. She nodded at Bellamy. “He said he wasn't very good at it. The class.”

“Huh.” Emori looked at Bellamy. “You'd think he would have been. Ended up being pretty good at the real thing.”

Echo shrugged. “I think he was too busy keeping his sister alive.”

“Yeah, that's Bellamy.” A hard edge to her voice. Echo hadn't realized before how angry she was about being made to leave. Emori rarely allowed herself to get angry anymore. “Always busy keeping someone alive. If all the people he loved were ever really safe – if there was really nothing for him to obsess about - I don't know if he'd actually be able to happy.” She paused, tossed one of the voting stones at an empty jar, hard. It bounced off. “Sorry.” The edge to her voice was gone. She seemed to have gotten out whatever it was that she needed to get out.

“For what? It's true.”

“No, it's not. He was happy here.” She sounded so sad that Echo avoided looking at her. She had never seen Emori cry, and she didn't want to now. “We were all happy here.”

There was a long, tired pause. Echo could have argued, but the moonshine had made her tongue heavy, and what was the point, really? Time to change the subject again.

“What happened there?” Echo nodded at John, who was watching them from the corner. When she looked over, he looked quickly down, but Emori didn't need to look to know what Echo was referring to.

She sighed. “Does it matter, if we all die tomorrow?”

“I don't know. Maybe that's the reason that it _does_ matter. Look, If you want to know if something matters in the big scale – if you want a big, poetic answer – ask Bellamy. Or Monty. Raven, even. But if you just want to get it off your chest and know that it won't go any further....” Echo made a sweeping gesture that landed with her hand on her own chest.

Emori was silent for so long that Echo assumed that she had decided against speaking. Fair enough. When she finally did, the moonshine had made Echo's eyelids so heavy that she thought at first that she was dreaming.

“Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be alone in the world with the person you love? I mean, truly alone? The last two people who exist?”

“Yes.” She spoke more quickly than she would have sober.

Emori smiled tightly. “You think, great, right? I mean, lonely maybe, but at least you have each other? But that's the thing. For me and John, that's the way it was from the very beginning. We were always the last two people in one another's worlds. We had both been cast out so many times... it was like, we didn't even choose each other. He loved me because he had to, because he had all of this love to give and nowhere else to put it.”

“That's not true.”

“But how do you know? Bellamy _chose_ you. Not because of who's on this ship – I don't mean he could have loved Raven, or me, or whatever. I mean that he could have loved anyone, or he could have been alone, because he's been loved before. He carries it with him, inside of him. When he loves, it's like growth from that love that he already carries. Same with you, and Monty, and everyone else here. You loved your people so deeply that your love for Bellamy is like an extension of that – can you see that? And his love for Octavia, and then for ... well, it grew to include all of us, because it was so big already, so fierce.”

 _Stop this_. Echo knew what name Emori had omitted in her brief pause. Always so quiet and steady - how long had Emori been quietly collecting shards of people's souls? How long had she held these weapons sheathed?

But Echo had asked for the truth, and it wasn't her fault that Emori just happened to be striking a nerve with it.

“John – he's never really been loved, and neither have I. We were so broken that all we knew to do was to break everyone around us. So when we found each other – someone else who understood that love is more terrible than a Praimfaya – we had two choices. We could kill each other and any hope of redemption, ever, or we could love each other with everything we had, and face the fire together. Do you understand?”

“No.” The knot in her heart was easing now that they were back to talking about Emori and John. “You can love, Emori. You love us. And... and we love you.” _Not_ the kind of thing she would have said sober.

“But only after I loved John, and only _because_ I loved him. Only because... only because John brought me to his people. To Clarke, who was willing to take the nightblood herself rather than test it on me. And to you all, who brought me with you – who made a space for me on that stupid rocket and on this Ark, even when supplies were short. Who count my vote, even when the vote doesn't go my way.”

“Of course.”

 _“No_. That's what I mean. It's 'of course' for you. You expect to be counted because you've always been counted. It will never be 'of course' for me. I will _always_ be afraid, Echo. I will always think that tomorrow will be the day that you will see me – really _see_ me. The me who was such a monster that my own mother cast me out to die. The me that John saw – recognized immediately – and loved with his own whole, worthless, broken self. No matter how much you show me otherwise, there is a piece of me that will always believe that when you finally know me, you all – my family – will cast me out, too.”

“But not John.”

“I could murder an innocent infant in front of him and John would still love me completely. John will never cast me out.”

“Then why push him away?”

 _“Because_ I could murder an innocent infant in front of him and he would still love me. That makes him a monster. That makes us _both_ monsters. There should be things that are more important than the person you love, but for me and John, there was nothing. We were alone in our own personal world – this world where everyone else had the power to destroy us at any moment. And it was a terrible world.” She shrugged. “I may never be able to live in your world, but I don't want to be in that world anymore either, this wasteland that he and I were haunting together. I don't want us to become monsters. Either of us.”

“Do you love him?”

Emori looked like Echo had struck her. “Always.”

“Do you love someone else?”

“Never.”

“Then I'm sorry, Emori, but this is stupid. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand it, but you love someone who loves you – only you. And we might all die tomorrow, and you're making both of you miserable.” She was on the downslide now. The moonshine had ceased to make her either elated or numb, and now she was pitching back down to earth with dizzying speed. “I just know that if you both die miserable, it seems like a waste to me.”

Emori sighed and tilted her head so that it was resting gently on Echo's shoulder. “There is that. I guess I just... try not to think about it.”

Echo surprised them both by snorting with laughter. On Earth, she had never once snorted; now it seemed like it happened fairly frequently.

“Uncertainty. Doubt. Making terrible choices for the people we love. Trying not to think about it.”

“What?” Emori's voice was drowsy.

“We could teach another class. 'Space Skills.'”

Emori was still smiling against Echo's shoulder when Echo drifted off to sleep. Later, Bellamy shook her awake and led her to their bed. It was too late, and they were too drunk, to do anything but hold one another, but she was glad that he had woken her for the final few hours that they would be home, spinning together through the stars.

****************

They wouldn't find Madi. That was the important thing. The art store was nearly a day's drive from here, and even if they knew to look for her, they would never find it. She kept repeating this to herself, trying to ignore the persistent doubt. Madi, after all, was 13 years old, and following orders wasn't her defining characteristic.

“If you take those off, you'll die.” She was sitting across from the tall, stooped figure. How could she ever have imagined that it might be Bellamy? A thousand years in space wouldn't have done this to him. Everything about the way he carried himself seemed... wild. Feral. As though he was built of stripped wires. The other figure seemed was still, and compact. It was wearing a hood over its face, and Clarke could tell nothing about it.

The tall figure smiled. “You're not wearing one.” He nodded at her noticeable lack of a radiation suit.

“I'm a special case.” She shrugged, her heart in her throat. “Go ahead, test it. I have nothing to lose.” She had no way of knowing if a non-nightblood could survive in the atmosphere right now. Until recently, she had been praying that it was safe. A year ago, before she and Madi started sabotaging them, the counters outside of the bunker had indicated that levels were returning to habitable, but were still slightly more elevated than expected. At the time, she had been afraid that Bellamy and the others would return too soon. As it turned out, it wasn't Bellamy's ship that she needed to worry about.

The shorter figure leaned over to say something in the taller one's ear. The tall turned to look at Clarke. “You're lying.”

What was giving her away? She was holding his gaze, her hands weren't shaking. She had faced down tougher foes than this bent, rail-thin ghoul. And all she needed to do was convince them of two things: That she was alone, and that the atmosphere wasn't safe. Neither so very far from the truth that it should have been a stretch.

“I'm not.”

“So our sensors are lying to us?” Damn. That was a pretty obvious oversight on her part – of course they would have a way of monitoring radiation other than exposure. They weren't 100 kids being sent down on a cobbled-together ship as lab rats; they were on a private corporation prison ship, and they had tech.

She shrugged, feigning indifference. “Your funeral. Except, obviously, I won't be giving you one. I tried to warn the other girl, too, but you know. People see me out here, without a suit, they get excited, they want to take theirs off, too. I get it.”

It was such obvious bait, they almost didn't take it. She could see the tall one thinking about it. While he did, she weighed her options. The body was about a day's hike from here, in the direction of the store. That was bad; that meant taking them in the direction of Madi. Also bad was the condition of the body. It had been dead for about two years at this point, and she would have to convince them that it was recent enough to be indicative of current radiation levels. What would they buy? Had they ever seen a body decompose after it had been exposed to radiation?

Either way, that was a whole new set of problems, and Clarke decided that she liked them better than the set she was currently facing. She had slowly dropped her hands as they spoke; now she raised them again in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn't believe me either, but the body is less than a day's walk away. I can show you.”

“Why would you care?” The tall man glowered at her, clearly uncertain. That was good. He was holding a weapon on her, so the fewer things he felt certain about, the better.

“Seriously? Because I want you to leave me alone, and the sooner you see that this planet isn't habitable for you, the sooner you'll do that.”

The two figures exchanged a long look. Finally, the tall one turned back to her and spoke. “OK. We'll go with you. But if -” He didn't get a chance to finish the sentence before the slighter figure moved, and moved quickly. The tall man's weapon was knocked to the ground and his suit slit open in one smooth movement. With his other hand, the slight figure hit a button on a device hanging by the suit's side, and the hatchway leading to the ship, for which the tall figure had started a panicked dash, began its inexorable close as the slighter figure held the man in place.

The man screamed as if he had been lit on fire. It was a death that Clarke had seen too many times, even to enemies. She looked away, but heard as the slighter figure knocked the tall man to the ground and kicked him, where he began to writhe and moan. Without a second glance, the standing figure turned back to Clarke and held his weapon steadily on her. It had all happened so quickly, she had barely begun to turn to run.

“Don't move. Don't be stupid.” The voice was a low growl. She still couldn't tell if it was a man or woman, and the ice-blue eyes behind the mask gave nothing away. The figure nodded at the figure at the ground, whose movements were slowing to stillness. “Stupidity can be a terminal illness on this planet.”

She didn't move. Not until the figure gestured with its gun for her to follow towards the now-open hatch, into the darkness of the prison ship.

************

Madi almost made a run for the closing hatch, but Echo held her back. “Coward,” whispered Bellamy. It had been his only contribution so far.

She still knew that it was a game, but she was afraid to stop. What would happen if she let herself believe that she was alone out here? So she let Echo guide her back to the shelter of the trees and crouch down beside her, as though they were making camp in the days before Praimfaya, and imagined her drawing on the ground with a stick. “Look, we're here, right? The ship extends this way, all the way back, away from us. If we'd followed them in, they would have known we were here, and we'd be trapped. But if we run back along the outside of the ship, and check for other entrances....”

“We might be able to take them by surprise.”

“Exactly.”

Madi felt pleased to have gotten the answer right. It was kind of like lessons with Clarke. _What would you do if you got stuck in that island in the middle of the river? What would you do if people came out of the ground and tried to take you away from me? What would you do if I didn't come back one day?_ As long as it was only a game, it was fun. The sooner she solved the problem, the sooner they could get back to the Rover, and Clarke would draw pictures and tell her stories about her friends, and the world that had come before.

But Clarke had always said that there needed to be at least two solutions to every problem, because sometimes one didn't work, so having one solution was like having no solutions. She said that Raven had taught her that, and that Raven and Monty were the two smartest people she knew.

So now Monty said, “What if there is no other entrance?” Raven came to crouch down, too. At the treeline, Emori and John kept watch. Bellamy stood in the shadows, watching.

“Then we wait.”

“That's not a solution.” Madi had really preferred it when Bellamy didn't speak up so much.

“Yes, it is.” Raven was always brave enough to stand up to Bellamy, even more so than Echo. “Because when you wait, things always change, and they might change in your favor. If you can afford to, you should always wait before taking a risk.”

“Or they might change for the worse. She could be dead by the time we get in there.” John spoke up from the tree-line. But he wasn't being mean, like Bellamy. Just worried. That was OK. Madi was worried, too.

As if reading her mind – _she is reading your mind, she is inside of your mind, they are not real_ – Raven said, “It's OK to be scared, Madi. You can feel scared and do something anyway.”

“I know. Clarke told me. She said she used to be scared almost all of the time, and she always had to do the things that scared her anyway. She said she turned out OK, and I will too.”

Bellamy scoffed, but Raven patted Madi on the shoulder. “That's right. She did, and you will too.”

Echo had been scanning the ship for signs of movement. There were none. “OK, solution number one, another entrance. It's dark, so if you stay close to the ground, they won't be able to see you even if they're looking out. Let's go.”

So the solitary little figure left the shelter of the tree-line and stayed low as she crept towards the dark, hulking ship. She was nearly there when the sky parted and, with a clap that even frightened the friends in her mind, re-formed itself around the second ship to come hurtling towards the ground that day.

****************

“Should we be going at night?”

Echo was glad that Harper had said something. She had been worried, too, but it was always easier to wait for someone else to ask the question.

“It's fine. I just took a little longer running the pre-launch checks than I thought I would. It turns out that without guns in my face or the apocalypse breathing down my neck, I kinda like to take my time and be thorough.” Raven scanned the faces looking back at her. “Look, we'll land where we land. It's not manual, so we don't need to see. The coordinates I programmed in should put us right back on the island, so that – so that we can get our bearings.”

Echo almost rolled her eyes. She wished that Raven would just admit that they were going back to the place they had left Clarke. It was like an unspoken agreement; they referred to Clarke only in the past tense or obliquely. Everyone's individual private memories of her were their own, but to the group, she was bigger than just one person. No one told funny stories about Clarke; no one talked about Clarke's mistakes. It was as though she was there for protection and blessings, as if she were a saint or a god - not a living, breathing girl who had chosen to burn to death so that the rest of them could live. Echo knew that Bellamy hated it, even as he himself acted as though her memory was too sacred to touch.

Even the name of the rocket that had brought them here, and which would be taking them back, was about the concept of Clarke, not Clarke herself. _The Princess._ When the others started referring to it that way, almost as soon as they landed and Raven began repairing the damage and readying for takeoff again (God forbid, Murphy had pointed out, she take a few days off; it wasn't like they had five years or anything), Echo assumed that Bellamy had started it. It seemed like the kind of nickname he might have coined, anyway: a mockery that hid a deeper truth.

So Echo did it too, more out of respect for him and his loss than anything else. She thought that it was sort of silly to name a rocket after a person, but every clan had their own way of grieving. Trikru planted the ashes of their people in the earth so that the spirit would be rooted and could always be found. To the Azgeda, an infinity spent tied to one place was what the weak and traitorous were cursed to; the honored were burned and cast to the four winds. If Skaikru wanted to put Clarke into a rocket, that was their call.

It was only when Echo casually referred to the rocket as “Princess” in front of Bellamy one evening, while they were on bow watch together, that she realized that he hadn't been the one to name the rocket.

“Don't call it that,” he snapped.

“The _Princess_?” She was genuinely startled. Was this an honor to which only Skaikru was entitled? It was true that only Azgeda could handle Azgeda ashes. Maybe this was like that?

But Bellamy softened almost immediately. “I'm sorry. I just mean... she's not a rocket. Clarke. She's... not our good luck charm.”

Echo understood immediately. “She's just Clarke.”

Bellamy turned back to staring at the earth, watching for asteroids and other space debris that never seemed to come. “She's just Clarke.”

It was naïve. She could never be “just Clarke,” again, Echo knew. She had died so that they could live – didn't he understand what became of the memory of people like that in the minds of those who lived on? Religions had been built on less.

But he had already lost her once. Echo couldn't bring herself to take his memory of her – the _real_ her – away, too. To the others, the rocket was a memorial. But for Bellamy, the idea of memorializing Clarke – of fixing her, unmovable and distant, in the past – had been unbearable. He hadn't been ready, then or now. She doubted he ever would be, even if he got back to earth and found himself standing over her decayed body.

Still, the name stuck, and seemed to stop bothering him, though he never used it himself. Echo got used to it and even began to like it. It made her feel close to the girl who had been so loyal to Echo's king, even when the rest of Skaikru betrayed him. Clarke had made many terrible decisions, but they had been for her people. Echo could understand that. She had never shared her grief with anyone, because they had lost so much more. But Clarke's death had made her terribly sad, and in the depth of her bones, she wanted to believe that the girl lived on, her courage somehow protecting them still, through the rocket.

But now, with Raven refusing even to say the sacred Clarke's name – as though either the memory or the hope of her had not been at the heart at every decision made about this journey from the moment they had decided to go – Echo was reminded of Bellamy's old grief. Did he still feel that way, she wondered? Did he wish, just once, that he and Raven could talk about her as if she was dead and gone, and just miss her? Raven went on, and Echo didn't look at Bellamy to see how he had taken the slanted reference to Clarke. “Look, we can wait, but there's really no point. The life support system is functional so we can stay on board until it gets light, if we want, but it's either gonna be waiting in the dark down there, or waiting in the dark up here.”

No one wanted to do that. To walk through the rooms that they would never see again, visit the places where they had sat together and built friendships that might soon be torn away from them, felt like mourning something that was not yet dead. It was macabre.

Besides, in spite of herself, Echo could feel the old thrill. _Riding out._ This morning, she had fought the urge to paint her face for the first time in six years. Today she would die, or she would live. Her only foe was chance, but it was more of a foe than she had faced in a long time, and she had missed the battle.

“We go.” Bellamy's voice was firmer than anyone had heard it in a long time, and loud, as though he were trying to speak over something only he could hear. “We've waited long enough.”

“Fine, Dad, geez.” It had been a while since John had used the nickname – created in the early days, when Bellamy was constantly checking in on everyone's health and well-being – but it seemed to lighten the atmosphere.

John was the first to swing himself into the _Princess_. As ever, he was turning his own courage into a joke; shielding them all from their own fear by taking it onto himself. “Look, if we go down in flames, I'm just saying, I voted to stay.”

“We'll put it on your grave marker.” Echo had learned from the library on the Ark that on the old Earth, humans had dug up big slabs of stone to mark graves, and written things on them about the person who had died. She liked the idea, and sometimes amused herself by thinking about what she would write for herself or her friends. “John: He Voted to Stay.”

“Echo: Kinda Bitchy til the End.” John's voice rang out from inside. “Anyone joining me?” His head popped back out, eyes wide. “Oh my god. Was this all a big prank just to get me off the Ark?”

Harper rolled her eyes and shoved him back in, following closely behind. Monty checked again to make sure that the transportable components of his aquafarm were strapped in. It was only nerves: they were already packed more securely than the Kru themselves would be. If anything made it, it was going to be the goddamn algae. He hopped in behind, followed closely by Raven, who had finally finished the external check to her satisfaction.

Emori went next, casting a last, longing glace around her first real home.

Echo turned to Bellamy to make a joke about stalling, and was caught off guard. His eyes were wide and full of pain. “Echo-” He started, “I'm so sorry.” He gestured around, helplessly, at the place where they had been happy – yes, in spite of it all, happy more often than not – for six long years. “I don't know....”

If he chose now to tell her that he didn't know if they had made the right decision, she would kill him. She might kill him anyway, for waiting until this moment to open up to her.

Instead, she gently took his hand. “Too late to turn back now.”

As she pulled them both aboard, she closed her eyes and whispered what felt more than ever like a prayer. “Princess, bring us home.”

****************

The ship was dark and still. Clarke hadn't seen this large of an enclosed space in a long time, and it took her eyes a few moments to adjust. When they did, she realized that, once the ship doors had closed and sealed, the figure in front of her had taken off both its radiation helmet and the mask beneath. The mask had begun giving her the terribly creepy feeling that she was going to recognize the face beneath it, so she was unreasonably relieved when it was unremarkable, other than for being one of the very few other humans she had seen in the past six years. His skin was smooth, but his age was indeterminate. He could have been a few years younger than Clarke, or a decade older. The only defining characteristic was a dramatic scar that gashed across his face from his left ear to the left side of his mouth, obscuring most of that half of his face. It looked like a burn scar, but an old one.

He was checking a bay of computer screens in front of him. His back was to her, but the easy confidence with which he had turned made her think that he was prepared for any move that she might make. Besides, she was in no hurry. He wasn't actually threatening to kill her at the moment, and the longer she kept him busy, the farther away Madi was getting.

Most of the screens were self-evident – temperature, barometric reading, radiation levels. A few appeared to be monitoring vital signs, though Clarke couldn't see any evidence that they were hooked up to people. One of these screens began an urgent beeping as the man brought up, on the screen next to it, a close-up of what looked like an ID card. Picture, name, serial number. And a date, but the date couldn't be a birthday. It was from old Earth, over a hundred years ago.

“Shit.” The muttered curse made him seem less confident, and Clarke re-assessed her estimate of his age. Definitely more of a boy than a man. He looked worriedly between her and the screen.

“Anything I can help with?” she asked sweetly.

His face hardened again, and she wondered if she had pushed her luck too far. But he just grabbed her wrist and piloted her down the rows of humming equipment until finally they came to a stop in front of a spot that was emitting a beeping that matched that of the computer at the front. “Yeah, Clarke.” She turned to him, panicked, and he sneered, clearly relieved at once again having the upper hand. “Oh, you didn't know that I knew your name?” He pushed a few buttons on the remote still dangling from his side, and the lights above them hummed into action. He pushed another button, and a panel on the wall in front of them slid aside to reveal another panel, this one clear. The man who had somehow known Clarke's name reached beneath the panel and pulled it out on a sliding drawer, like in the old morgue they had had on the Ark. “You want to know how you can help? Fix him.”

Clarke's breath caught in her throat. She was looking at a man, younger still than the one who had slid out the drawer. He was unconscious, but breathing – barely. He looked as though he was choking on his breathing tube. Clarke thought he had probably somehow aspirated a part of the tube – something that could happen with old or poorly maintained equipment. She might be able to help him, or she might not – it would depend a good deal on what equipment she had available to her, and chance.

But that wasn't what caught her breath and rendered her unable to respond to the man in front of her, this mysterious man who had landed on her planet, hers and Madi's, committed the first murder in years without blinking an eye, and who somehow knew her name.

One drawer, one man, one life support system. The computers at the front of the ship, beeping away, raising the alarm when one system detected a problem. But how many systems were there? She looked up and down the row where they were standing, thought about how many rows she had walked past on the way to this one.

A lot. That's how many. What would she and Madi do if these people all woke up? The radiation would keep them inside for now, but what if it fell to a livable level? Or what if – her chest tightened, and she wanted to scream for Madi to run, _run_ – what if they discovered the nightblood solution?

She couldn't save this man. Where would it end? She shook her head, mutely, and stepped back. “There's nothing I can do for him. I'm sorry.”

The boy with the blue eyes raised his pistol to the side of her head, careful to angle it up so that the bullet wouldn't hit any of the life support systems piercing her skull. “Then there's nothing I can do for you.”

Clarke realized this was the moment she had been waiting for since she stepped on board the ship - that a part of her had been waiting for for six years. She was... sad to leave Madi. But what a small feeling that was, compared with the overwhelming relief. She could be finished. No more missing people, no more living with ghosts. No more living with the things she had done, seeking redemption in vain. And Madi would be safer with one less nightblood in the world, one less way for people to discover the solution.

She closed her eyes, waiting. She knew that it was coming. His voice always came to her in moments like this. It had been so long since she'd heard it, for real, she sometimes wondered if it could really have been so soft and still have held so much power over her.

_We save who we can save, today._

She opened her eyes and sighed. She should have known he wouldn't let her rest that easy. “I might be able to help. I'm not making any promises. But I'll need something sharp, and clean. And before we do anything else, you'll need to get him out of that box.”

****************

Harper, Raven, Emori and Murphy all got pretty banged up on re-entry. Echo hit her head, but didn't bleed too badly; Bellamy hit his head and bled all over the damn place.

Both Monty and his algae were untouched.

“Ha! Perfect landing! Perfect landing!” Raven struggled to remove her harness. It was the first time she had made the trip in a fully functional craft that hadn't had at least one or two improvised parts, and Echo could understand why she was excited at the success.

“Excuse me? Tell that to my.. ow. Monty, ow.” Murphy struggled to his feet and collapsed again as Monty, in his haste to check on everyone, elbowed him in the ribs.

“Are you OK? Is everyone OK?”

“I would be better if you would wait until we could see to – _ow_.”

The foot that Monty had stepped on got added to the list of casualties, but as Raven pointed out, no one had died, which, everyone had to admit, did make the landing pretty perfect.

They stared at the door.

“What do the monitors say?” Harper's voice trembled. 

Raven looked at the screen in front of her. “Radiation is higher than we would expect it to be, but still livable for us. It would kill a mountain man within seconds.”

Bellamy took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Good thing we're not mountain men.” They hadn't wasted space on the  _Princess_ with radiation suits. If the planet was still radioactive, they were dead, anyway, and they needed the space for things like Monty's aquafarm – ways to survive on a planet that might be nothing like the one they had left behind. “OK. I'll go first. Close the hatch immediately after I'm out, and don't come out until you hear me knock. I'll let you know that it's safe.”

He turned away from them, and it was as though the last six years had blown away like smoke. Here he was again – Bellamy the leader. If anyone was going to fry, he was going to make sure he was the first to go up in flames.

Except – the last six years _had_ happened.

“Nice try, Blake, but I'm the one who got us down here, so I'm the one who gets to touch ground first.” Raven's tone brooked no argument.

“Yeah, asshole, you dragged us down here and now you're going to make us wait in the ship while you go exploring?” John's tone was light but his eyes were hard. He had changed, too. He was every bit as determined to survive as he had always been, but now he was just as determined to keep the rest of them alive with him. 

“Bell, don't waste time. We're all going, and you know it.” Before he could argue, Raven pulled a lever, and the ramp was opening.

**************** 

How was it that he had lived here for less than two years, and it still felt more real to him than any other place than he had ever been? A moment ago, inside the _Princess_ – Bellamy hated that name because Clarke would have hated it, but it had become habit to think of the rocket that way – “home” had still been the Ring. It was gone, probably forever, but it was “home” nonetheless.

But now, with the night sky expanding in front of him, looking at the stars from below – the way humans were _meant_ to see them – smelling real air for the first time in so long, his body remembered. He belonged here.

_I should never have left._

No time for that now. There was so much to do. He kept one hand on the rifle at his side, and he could feel Echo holding the same stance with her sword. So many years of training with one another, but when danger came, they would always fall back on the weapons of their own people.

For a moment, it all felt so familiar. The dizzying fall from the Arc, the opening of the doors, the first few cautious steps forth. He almost expected Octavia to turn to him, her boots on the Ground for the first time, with those wide, excited eyes of hers; to be able to turn around and watch as Finn made the fateful first steps toward his love for Clarke.

And if Bellamy could have stepped out of his own body in that moment, seen himself seeing her for the first time, what would he be watching? What had he been taking the first steps into?

But the feeling was fleeting. That day, they had been surrounded by green. Today... there was green. Some. But more than that, there was red. Searing, empty, aching red as far as the eye could see. With patches of dead gray, where granite heaved itself up between the seas of red sand. It was unlike any landscape Bellamy had ever seen, and his heart broke for the paradise he had left.

Still – it was Earth. They were home. And if there was one thing he knew about Earth, it was that you couldn't let your guard down for a moment. So when the trees rustled, Bellamy was ready. He had hope, but he wasn't a fool. The bunker should have opened a year ago now, and if there was a _second_ thing he knew about earth, it was that alliances forged in crisis dissolved just as quickly back into war when the crisis had passed. For all they knew, they had landed right in the middle of a Wonkru civil war.

So when the little girl stepped out of the clearing and began to walk towards them, he didn't waver, but held her in his rifle sights.

He didn't move when he saw that she was wearing Clarke's old jacket.

And he didn't move when she drew close enough for him to see, at last, Clarke's father's watch – the watch that Clarke would never have given up willingly; the watch over which an entire Trikru village had been slaughtered – around her neck, and his last whisper of hope gave up and flew away, leaving his heart as empty and lifeless as the silent, irradiated forest before them.

****************

It was them, and not them. Monty looked worried, and Monty never looked worried. Murphy and Emori weren't standing together, but in the drawings, they were _always_ together. Raven looked confused. Bellamy – well, Bellamy looked right, anyway. He was holding a gun on her. And his eyes were as unreadable as ever.

She kept walking, even though his gun was still on her. Echo wouldn't let him shoot her.

She was right. Echo held out a hand and placed it on top of Bellamy's gun, forcing him to lower it.

“What are you doing?” she hissed, loudly enough that Madi could hear, even though she was still 30 paces away. “She's just a little girl.”

“She has Clarke's watch,” Bellamy responded through gritted teeth.

“What?”

“She is wearing. Clarke's watch. Around her neck. Like a goddamn _war trophy_.” His breath was coming fast, as though he had been running, but Madi knew that they had just gotten off the ship. She had watched them. He swung his gun back up and held it on her again, steadily, though his voice had been shaking with rage.

 _Oh_. Her hand went to her throat, where she wore the watch on a chain that Clark had made out of an old, broken part that they'd had to replace in the Rover. They were going to want it, of course. They were going to try to take it, and then she would have to fight them. Clarke's friends. Or she would have to explain to Clarke why she didn't have the watch. Either way, she was going to get into trouble.

She stopped and clutched at the watch, tugging it on the chain as she thought. The man who was Bellamy-but-not-Bellamy didn't move, though the rest of them had lowered their weapons to their sides, even Echo. Usually, if Madi had a difficult choice to make and she couldn't talk to Clarke about it, she would get out one of the pictures and play the game. Raven gave the best advice, of course, unless it was about war, in which case she would ask Echo.

This was not about war. She hoped.

****************

The girl in front of them had stopped and was staring at them, frowning.

“You're scaring her. She's just a kid,” Echo had seen the look on Bellamy's face and was genuinely afraid for the girl, and for him. She had heard about what happened the Trikru village the last time someone had stolen Clarke's watch. It was just a fucking watch. 

“We're on Earth. No one is 'just a kid,' here. Remember?” Reluctantly, Bellamy had started, again, to lower his gun, but he snapped it back up as the girl's hand moved towards her pocket. “The fuck is she going for? Raven, back in the rocket, guard the supplies. Monty and Echo, with me. Everyone else, cover us.” The others moved uneasily into position, even Raven, edging slowly back to the hatch.

She froze, though, when the girl spoke, calling out across the distance. “Raven? Can you come here please? I need to talk to you for a minute.” Her tone was plaintive, but not pleading. It was as if it hadn't occurred to her that they would find it strange for her to know Raven's name, as if this was something they all did every day.

Raven froze.

“Don't move. It's a trap.” Bellamy himself took one slow, cautious step forward, and called out, “No one is going anywhere. Where did you hear that name?”

But Echo was beginning to notice things. Not just the jacket and the watch, but how the girl did her hair – curly and mostly loose, with one slim, long braid woven through it. It was a Trikru style, but the girl had no other Trikru markings. Echo had seen Clarke wear her hair like that sometimes. And the look of the girl was... odd. She didn't look like Skaikru, but she didn't have the markings of any of the other clans that Echo had known. Of course, there could be new clans, but this girl had no markings at all. She looked … cared for, so she wasn't an outcast. Not an outcast, no clan. Not hardened enough to know not to walk up to a group of strangers in the middle of nowhere.

Someone was taking care of this kid.

When Raven still didn't move, the girl's voice grew slightly panicky. “Or Monty? I can talk to Monty. Or Echo or Emori. _Please_ , just come here? I just... I just really need to talk to you?” Her breath hitched, making the last statement sound like a question. She was fighting tears.

Bellamy's voice was no more than a growl. “How do you know our names? How did you get that watch?” The girl frowned, as though it was a strange question.

Then her eyes grew wide, as though she was realizing something – something that scared her. “Oh....” it was almost a moan. She turned and for a moment Echo thought she was going to run, but she turned back, frightened and confused. Something was keeping her here. She was afraid, but she couldn't leave them. It was as though they were providing her with the only sense of safety she had left.

That was when Echo knew, but she couldn't say it. The words stuck in her throat.

“I just have to talk to one of you, _please_. Any of you.” Finally, in desperation. "You can have the watch, OK? You can have the watch!"

“Fine.” Bellamy seemed to relax now that she was done listing names. “You can talk to me.” He started forward, rifle still in hand.

The change was immediate. The quaver was gone from her voice, the eyes went from tearful to hard in a moment. “ _No_. One of the others. Not you.”

“Because you don't know me?” He looked almost triumphant, as though this little girl were his nemesis and he had scored a point on her.

The girl glared at him, then frowned, as though struggling to explain something. She shifted her weight and sighed, looked down. Her hand drifted to her pocket again, but she didn't try to take anything out.

Finally, she looked back up at Bellamy and spoke. Her voice was calm, and her eyes were still cold as ice. “I know you. Of course I know you. You're Bellamy." Bellamy's face fell. Whatever theory he had been forming about how she had known their names had clearly come crashing down under this new blow.

"You're the reason she's sad.” The girl paused as this sank in, as one by one the Spacekru heard the words and, one by one, realized what they might mean, what Echo already knew. The girl held Bellamy's gaze and, for the first time since she had stepped out of the woods, he let his rifle fall. He had stopped breathing, and was watching the girl as though, if he took his eyes off of her, she might vanish.

“You're the one who left her to burn.” 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the lovely comments! xo

At least they seemed to have forgotten about the watch. She wasn't going to remind them of it, but now she had a new problem. Everyone was staring at her, silently, no matter what she said. And Raven wouldn't come.

It had all seemed so clear a moment ago. When she needed to be saved, the ship had finally arrived. Just like in one of Clarke's stories. It had been so incredible that she wondered at first if it might have just been a continuation of the game, if her brain was starting to play it without her permission.

But they were real. And they were acting in ways that she couldn't predict. And... even though she knew them, they didn't know _her._

She had never realized that before, not really. But to see them all staring blankly at her – to realize that, as familiar as they all were, she was a stranger to them – loosed a hard knot of panic inside.

Clarke was in trouble. These people couldn't help her.

 _Yes, we can._ Raven's voice was soft, but certain.

No. You're not _real._

_Aren't we? We're standing right there._

But that's not _you._ I don't know those people.

_You do. Clarke told you. She helped you so many times. Now she needs help. Are you going to run away?_

One by one, they all asked the question. Bellamy's voice, the last to speak, was hard and angry. _Are you going to run away?_

The real Bellamy stood before her, impassive. It was strange, but she was starting to prefer him to the others, since he was the only one acting the way he was supposed to. Scary.

He hadn't moved since she had told him what she knew about him, except to slowly lower his gun. His face was impassive, his eyes shuttered. The others looked to him, as if waiting for a sign of life. None came. She had meant to hurt him, but she hadn't meant to kill him. Would Clarke be angry?

Finally, Raven spoke. “Who are you? Who told you that?” There was a long pause, as though there was a question that no one wanted to ask. Then, at last - “Did Clarke say that?”

“Of course not.” Madi spoke scornfully. Raven should know better. The real Raven – now she was starting to think of the voices in her mind as more real than the frozen figures before her – would never ask such a stupid question. “Clarke could never say that.”

“Then who?”

“No one needed to tell me. I just knew. I've always known.” Always? Before she met Clarke, even? When had she started to know things that no one had told her?

Raven shook her head, slowly. “I don't know who you are, but that's wrong. We didn't leave Clarke to burn. We tried to take her with us.”

Again, Madi was shocked that Raven could be so wrong, could misunderstand so deeply. “ _No._ The rest of you would _never.”_

It was as though, in insisting to talk to Raven, Madi had somehow cast a spell that prevented any of the others from speaking at all. “But – it was the same for all of us. She died saving _all_ of us.”

“No.” Finally, Bellamy spoke. His voice was raw and halting, as if slicing him open from the inside. He may have been speaking to Raven, or to all of them, or to none of them, but he never broke eye contact with Madi. She wished he would.

“It's isn't the same for all of us. Is it?”

Raven sounded angry. “Of course it is. How could it not be?”

Madi opened her mouth to respond, but Bellamy was quicker. “Because you - all of you - were only supposed to survive. That was all she needed from you – for you to go on and survive.” 

Bellamy's eyes were not supposed to look like that – like liquid pain. She started to feel uneasy. Clarke wouldn't want her to hurt him this way. But Bellamy wasn't supposed to be so easy to hurt. She wanted now to take it back, to insist again on talking only to Raven. She had never meant to wield this powerful of a weapon.

But it was too late. Raven wasn't going to let it go. “Well what the hell were _you_ supposed to do, then?”

Madi was thankful when he again looked down, placing his eyes in shadow.

“I was the one who was supposed to protect her.” 

****************

 _“Enough.”_  Echo was done watching Bellamy torture himself, or be tortured by this little girl. There were more important things to deal with.

Raven had referred to Clarke as dead, but the evidence was pointing more and more to another conclusion. When it came to Clarke, why were they all so _stupid_? Why was Bellamy being so maudlin when he had finally gotten the one thing for which he would have sold his soul – _all_ of their souls – five minutes ago? What did it _matter_ whether Clarke was pissed at them?

She was _alive._

She strode forward, ignoring Bell's shout of warning. She was pretty sure he'd forgotten her existence during his horrible conversation with the girl, so she wasn't about to let his concern for her hold her back now. She grabbed the girl by her upper arm and shook her so hard that she cried out, but when the girl looked up at her, her eyes were flooded with relief.

That worried Echo. Most people didn't look relieved when she was threatening them with physical violence.

So she shook a little harder. “Where is Clarke? Is she alive? Is she OK?”

The girl's eyes widened. “Which question do you want me to answer?”

Ordinarily, this would have earned her a smack from Echo. She hadn't been treated gently as a child, and she didn't feel the need to be gentle with anyone else just because they had only been alive for a certain number of years.

But in this case, the girl seemed to be asking a genuine question. Echo wondered if she even knew _how_ to be a smart-ass. She wondered what it was like to spend most of your childhood alone on a planet with someone as earnest as Clarke, and felt an unexpected surge of empathy for the girl.

“The last one - is she OK.”

Madi paused, thinking. “No.”

Suddenly, it was harder to breathe than it had been when they had first arrived on the Ring, before the O2 generators kicked on. Stars danced before Echo's eyes, and she heard the collective intake of breath behind her. Again, when it came to Clarke, everyone reacted without thinking. She held up a hand, willing them to pause.

“The second question. Is she alive?”

“Yes. I think. An hour ago, she was.”

She felt, more than heard, the exhale. There it was. Confirmation, at last, of their greatest hope, but also their worst fear – that she had been alone down here, for six long years. That they truly had abandoned her.

Echo expected to feel something more that she did. This was it – her own private ghost, come to life in the words of this creepy girl. This was the answer to the question they had all been too afraid to openly ask, but couldn't stop thinking. She should have felt _something._ But she was completely numb.

Because she had already known.

_How did I know?_

No time for that now. “The first question, now.”

“In the ship.”

As one, the Kru all turned to look back at the _Princess._ Echo's heart plummeted. Had that been what the girl was talking about all along? Had she somehow known about the name of the ship, the way she knew all of their names, and was she saying that Clarke's memory was alive in the ship, or some bullshit like that?

If so, Echo would fucking murder her. If not for herself, for Bellamy. She was pretty sure that, after believing Clarke was alive for five minutes, it would, quite literally, kill him to lose her again. Especially after the other trash that the girl had said about him. She'd claimed that it hadn't come from Clarke, but who else could have told her? Bellamy was supposed to _protect_ her? And die himself, presumably, as he would have, if he'd tried. Unlike Clarke. Had anyone bothered explaining that to this kid?

But the girl was already shaking her head, impatiently. “No, not _that_ ship. The other one. The bad one.”

And finally having given them enough information to be reasonably confident that they would follow her, she turned and headed back to the treeline.

****************

“We can't get in.” Raven sounded matter-of-fact, but Bellamy knew what it had cost her to make the admission. It had been reckless of her to get so close to the ship with only the darkness to cover her, but he understood the impulse. It had taken everything in him to stay with the others by the treeline, knowing that he would only be endangering Raven if he went with her. It was better that she go: she was smaller than him, and knew what she was looking for. So when she returned in less than five minutes, it was either going to be very good news or very, very bad news.

Bad news.

“It looks beat up from the outside, but it was designed to withstand a nuclear holocaust. Meaning it's going to keep out radiation _and_ us.”

“But we have to _try.”_ Emori sounded desperate, and Bellamy recalled that, despite having barely known Clarke, she had always seemed deeply bothered by having left her behind on Earth. He had never had a conversation with her about it - none of them ever talked about their individual feelings about Clarke, except occasionally when he and Raven got very, very drunk together - but, just like all of them, she been haunted in her own personal way by the death. 

_Not death. Not dead._

The thought flooded him with adrenaline, making his hands shake. He knew how Emori felt. He wanted to punch the hangar door open, and part of him thought he might be able to do it through sheer force of his desperation. 

But that would have been a definite “heart” decision, and this was probably a “head” situation.

He shook his head at Emori. “If we alert them to our presence, they might kill her.” _If she's not already dead._ _Please don't be dead._ He turned to Raven. “So? What's the plan?”

Raven shrugged, clearly troubled. “We wait until light, see if we can get a sense of what's going on in there. They can't stay holed up forever. If they took her, it was for a reason. If we can figure out the reason, maybe we can figure out how to get her out.”

Bellamy was worried that the kid was going to freak out. She seemed pretty high-strung, and clearly, she depended on Clarke. But she just nodded seriously at Raven, as he had done. “If we wait, the situation might change in our favor. If we act on emotion, we might make the situation worse.” She sounded as if she was referring to an earlier conversation – one that none of them had heard.

“That's... right.” Raven frowned at the oddly grave child. “Why don't you try to get some sleep? It's going to be at least a few more hours until the sun is up.”

The girl looked shocked, the eyes that had been drooping a moment before snapping open. “I can't. Clarke's not here.”

Raven looked unsure how to respond. Harper stepped forward.

“Honey, I know that you're scared....”

“I'm _not_ scared.” The girl's lower lip jutted out in a way that reminded Bellamy very much of Octavia at ... this age? How old was this kid, exactly? O had pouted like that intermittently from the time she was two until ... well, right around the time they landed on Earth for the first time. 

It occurred to him, with some surprise, that he might be the best equipped of the group to handle this. He crouched down before her and adopted an indifferent tone.

“OK, well that's great then. If you're not afraid _or_ tired, maybe you should keep watch while the rest of us get some sleep.”

Echo frowned at him, but the girl's shoulders relaxed, even as a slightly worried frown crossed her face.

“Just... me?”

“Sure, if you want. Or... actually, on second thought, we should always have two people on watch, right? I'll sit up with you. Maybe just rest my eyes a little.” He nodded to a fallen tree, about 20 feet away from the where they stood, with a clear line of sight to the ship. “That looks good, right? Unobstructed view? What do you think?” He nodded at the others. “Go grab some shut-eye, you guys. We'll just be right over here.” Without giving her time to second-guess him, he grabbed a blanket from one of the packs they had brought with them from the _Princess_ and sat up against the tree with it. “Oh... I guess you can share this, if you want.”

Cautiously, as though he was still leveling a gun at her face – the memory now flooded him with shame – the girl approached and sat down gingerly at his side. Her back was ramrod straight. She took the corner of blanket that he offered and wrapped it around herself, but held her body gingerly away from his. He let his side drop so that it acted as a natural barrier between them, and she relaxed.

He didn't blame her for not trusting him, and not just because of the gun. He had, after all, been the one to leave _her_  to burn.

The words had been echoing inside of his head for the last hour, as they had made their way here from the rocket. He felt as though he was operating in two different planes of reality. One self continued to function, to talk to his friends, to focus on the task of getting Clarke the fuck out of that ship. The other, the one that still stood by the hangar door, his gun clasped uselessly in his numb hand... well, that one knew that there was no point to any of this, because Clarke was dead. Because this girl had finally confirmed what he had known in his bones to be true for all of these years, no matter what the voice in his head tried to tell him.

His most important job had been to protect her, and instead he had left her to burn.

The sleepy voice next to him startled him from his thoughts, and he was glad for the distraction.

“Do you know any stories?”

 _Hundreds._ “No.”

A long pause. “Clarke always tells me stories before bed.”

He could picture it, as absurd as it was. Where had Clarke found a child on this planet? But of course, it seemed inevitable somehow. He wouldn't have been surprised to find that this girl had been conjured out of thin air, out of the fierceness of Clarke's own heart, of her need to have someone to love and protect and fight for.

The thought made him ache, so he put the image of Clarke telling stories, night after night, building something safe and lovely out of a nuclear wasteland, into the box in his head where he put everything that made him ache. One of these days it was going to explode, but it hadn't happened yet.

“I thought you weren't going to bed.”

“I'm _not_.” Behind them, blankets and leaves rustled as the others settled in for a few hours of rest. “I just thought, as long as we're sitting here....”

Bellamy sighed, remembering how futile it was to fight when a kid was asking for a story. Nights after school or, later, basic training, when he would come back to the room so weary that his eyes hurt, Octavia would be awake and wired, waiting for him. Half-blind with fatigue, he would stay up far into the night, telling her the stories that their mother had told him – their mother, who by then was too tired and jaded to tell them anything at all, except to be careful – so that, in the darkness beneath the floor, she would at least have the pictures in her head that he had given her.

He sighed. “Fine. Did she ever tell you the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?”

The girl wrinkled her nose. “Were they in the original Hundred?”

“What?” It took him a minute to realize what she meant. “Oh.... no.”

“Grounders, then? Arkadians?”

“No, they weren't.... this story is older than that. Do you want to hear it or not?” In response, she scooted a degree closer to him.

“OK. So Orpheus was the son of Apollo.”

“Was _he_ from the Ark?”

“No. Just listen. Apollo got Orpheus a lyre. That's like... a fancy guitar. Do you know what a guitar is?”

“I'm not _stupid.”_ She looked up at him witheringly.

Ah. A teenager, then.

“Well, that's good. OK, so Orpheus got this lyre, and he was good with it. No one expected him to be, because he'd never really been that good at anything before, but he was _really_ good. Better than anyone had ever heard. And he went around playing this lyre...” Bellamy tried to remember if there was more to this part of the story. Octavia would know - this had been one of her favorites. He decided to make it up. “So he was in the woods one day, playing this lyre, when he saw the most beautiful woman in the world. Eurydice.”

“That's a weird name.”

“Yeah, they're all weird names. Get used to it. Hey - what's your name, by the way?" It seemed incredible that none of them had asked her so far.

She looked at him suspiciously, but answered simply, "Madi."

"Not nearly as weird." Had Clarke named her? It wasn't the kind of name he would have expected Clarke to choose, but maybe it was short for something more... serious. Of course, he had to admit to himself, there were a lot of things about Clarke he didn't know. Like what she would name a kid if she found them in the middle of a nuclear wasteland and decided to raise them as her own.

"So he saw Eurydice, and he knew that she was special - _way_ more special than him. And that there was nothing that he could ever, ever do to be good enough for her.

“But, see, she loved music. _Loved_ it. So he knew that that was the one thing that he could offer her that no one else could. He wasn't very smart, he wasn't rich or anything, and he was OK looking but there were better-looking dudes who were after her. But he did have this one thing, you know?” Something in the box inside Bellamy's chest was hammering to get out, but he couldn't let it.

“So he played his music for her, pretty much all the time. It was just about all their relationship was – him playing his music, her digging it. But it was enough for him because he knew that he was doing something important – she was so special, and he was doing this one thing that really mattered for her.

“Then, one day, she went into the woods without him. Oh, they had gotten married by now. So she went into the woods without him, even though... even though he didn't really want her to go. He always missed her, and worried when they weren't together. But she did, and just like he'd always been afraid, she got hurt. Killed." 

“ _What?”_ The girl's head had been starting to nod, but now it snapped up. “Wait – she died?”

“Yeah. Do you still want to hear this?” It occurred to Bellamy that this might not have been the best story to tell while they were waiting for signs of life from the ship, but it was too late now. “I might know some happier ones.”

“No, finish it. Clarke tells me scary stories all the time.”

Bellamy wondered what qualified as a “scary story” for Clarke, since it sounded like most of her stories were based on real events and people. Finn, murdering a Trikru village? He and Clarke irradiating innocent civilians? Certainly, nothing in his collection of myths could measure up to the terror that Clarke might have already shared with this kid. “You'll have to tell me one of those sometime. So, anyway, she.... died.” If he remembered the original correctly, there might have been a rape in there, but he had always left that part out when he was telling it to Octavia, too.

“So he almost went crazy with grief, but the thing is, there was still the one thing about him that she had really loved, you know? His music. And he knew that if he went really, really crazy, and stopped playing music, it would be like he was letting her down.”

“But she was dead.”

“Well, yeah. Letting... I guess, letting the _idea_ of her down. So he played music about his grief, and it was so beautiful and sad that it drove everyone around him to tears, and they were so sad that they made him leave the town and go into the forest with his lyre. But he just kept playing out there, but his grief was so momentous that his music made the earth itself crack open in pain, and he fell into the Underworld, where Hades had taken her.”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh, right. OK, so Hades was a god of the Underworld, which was this scary place people went after they died. Don't worry about it.”

“Will I go there?”

Oh, no. This was not a conversation that he was prepared to have. “What does Clarke say will happen to you after you die?”

“That I'll blow with the four winds forever.” Her voice had a hint of uncertainty.

“Right, OK, well that's what's going to happen. You're not going to the Underworld. So, anyway, he played his lyre for Hades.” He was beginning to speed up now, realizing how far in over his head he was. Why hadn't he just gone with one of the nice stories where someone ends up getting their guts pecked out by birds, or rolling a stone up a hill for eternity?

“So, Hades was so impressed with his music that he said, fine, you can have Eurydice back.”

“Oh.” She sounded simultaneously relieved and let down.

“ _But._ ” Too late, Bellamy realized he should have ended the story there. “There was only one thing that Orpheus had to do. He had to prove his faith in her by walking all the way back up to the surface with her walking right behind him, and he wasn't allowed to look over his shoulder. He just had to believe in her.”

“That's easy,” Madi scoffed.

“Well, it would have been, except that she was an Underworld shade - like a ghost - and she wasn't going to turn back into a human until they got back up to surface. So the whole time they were walking back, he couldn't hear her. She had no footsteps.”

“So?”

“So, he kept over-thinking it. What if it was a trick? What if she didn't really want to come back with him? What if she had changed her mind? What if -” the words almost stuck in Bellamy's throat - “what if he lost her again?

“So finally, he couldn't bear the suspense. His doubt got the better of him. He was _ten steps_ away from the surface when he gave up and looked back. She had been there all along. But since he looked back, Hades snatched her back down to the Underworld, and Orpheus had to go on to the surface without her.”

“So what did they do? How did they get her back?”

“Um...” A long pause. “I mean, they didn't.”

“What?” She thought, hard. “Did they ask Raven how?”

“Wait, what?” He felt like they were speaking different languages.

“Did Orpheus ask Raven how he should get Eurydice back? I bet she could have built something.”

“I mean... no. It's just a story. Raven wasn't in it.”

The girl frowned. “But Raven's in almost all the stories.”

“Not.... not this one.” 

“Wait, is this true? Did this really happen?”

“Well... no. It's a story.”

The girl scooted away from him as though he had scalded her. “It's a _lie?”_

“Not a lie, no. Just … not true.”

She glared at him, betrayal in her eyes. How had he managed to mess this up so badly? “It's supposed to be about – about something bigger than the story. Bigger than the people. It's not a lie, it's just a _bigger_ truth. Like, you could say it's kind of about how... how he lost her by trying to hold on to her too tightly.”

She continued to frown, but relaxed a bit and moved closer to him again. “That's stupid. They should have just asked Raven to build something for them to go down there and get her.”

He had to admit that would have been a better ending.

They sat in silence for a few more moments, until a rustle behind them alerted them to Murphy's presence.

“Hey, I'm not going to sleep tonight. Want me to take over?” He nodded at the girl. “You know, on co-watch?”

Bellamy wasn't sorry to have some time to himself to think.

As he walked away, he heard the girl ask, “do you know any stories?”

To Bellamy's surprise, Murphy, who had spent hours upon hours on the Ring in the Old Earth entertainment archives, took this request completely in stride.

“Sure. I know loads of stories. Ever hear of The Terminator?”

“Is it true?”

“True enough.”

Their voices faded as Bellamy headed back to the others, trying to ignore the feeling that he was listening behind him for footsteps.

****************

Only after she had stabilized the man in the pod was the gun at Clarke's head lowered. It hadn't actually been as bad as she had feared – a small piece of the breathing tube had broken off, and become lodged in his throat, but it didn't make it into his lungs. She had been able to remove it with only a small incision, and the man had lapsed back into unconsciousness after waking for a brief, panicked moment.

The man with the gun, whom Clarke had begun to think of simply as “Scar,” frowned at him, absently. Clarke wondered if she should take the opportunity to try to get his gun away from him, but she wasn't optimistic about her chances, and the situation still didn't seem dire enough to risk it.

“So what's the plan? Just keep trouble-shooting the medical emergencies until the level of radiation drops enough to wake them all up?”

The man glowered at her. “Should be a lot easier now that I've got a doctor on-board.”

“I'm not a doctor.”

“Closest thing I'm gonna find on this damn planet.”

Clarke decided there was no point in telling him about the qualified medical professionals living (she prayed) underground not a day's walk away. It wouldn't end well.

“So, what, you're going to hold me hostage indefinitely? How long can you hold that gun? How long can you stay awake?” For the first time since he'd removed the mask, she saw a flicker of doubt cross his face. Good. Doubt was good. “Look, just tell me what you need, let me come and go freely, and I'll help you. But if you try to hold me hostage, I swear I'll escape the first chance I get.” _And I'll kill you while I'm at it, so you won't be a threat to Madi._ “And you know, now that you've killed your buddy out there, you can't keep me here. Not all by yourself.”

The doubt left his face as quickly as it had come, making her wonder if she had imagined it. “You forget – I have a whole _ship_ of buddies.” Without moving the gun, he reached out with his other hand and flipped open the lid of the pod containing the man on whom she'd just operated. The snowy white bandage on his throat was marred by a faint hint of red – other than that, he could have been asleep. After having been brought off of the life-support systems so that Clarke could operate, he hadn't needed any assistance to breathe on his own. Clarke had assumed that they were just waiting to make sure he was stable before they put him back under.

Scar shook him.

“Get up.”

Clarke reached out to grab his arm, but stopped when he cocked the gun. “Stop! He can't get up, I just stitched that incision closed.”

“Well then, I guess we'll have to hope you did a good job.” He shook the man in the pod more roughly. “Get _up.”_

The man's eyes fluttered open, and, catching sight of the gun, widened in terror. He tried to sit up in an attempt to get away from the assault, but collapsed almost immediately.

“His muscles are atrophied,” Clarke snapped. “You can shoot him, but it won't make him able to stand.”

“I don't need him to stand. I need him to hold a fucking gun in your fucking face.” He leaned over so that his face was an inch away from that of the cowering man. “Do you hear that? I need you to hold a _fucking_ gun in this bitch's _fucking_ face. Think you can manage that?”

The man shook his head, slowly. Scar sighed and swung the gun so that it was pointing, once more, at Clarke's head. “She's the one who saved you. You would be dead right now if it weren't for her. Do you understand?”

The man didn't respond. Moving as quickly as a striking snake, Scar backhanded Clarke with the hand holding the gun. She gritted her teeth against the screaming pain and staggered sideways, but barely managed to stay on her feet. She raised her eyes to Scar. His image swam before her but she held his gaze, blinking blood out of her eyes, until Scar turned back to the other man.

“ _Do you understand?”_

The man nodded, slowly. Scar turned the handle of the gun so it was facing the man. “If you don't want me to hurt her worse, take this _fucking gun right now_ and don't let her walk out of this ship. _Do you understand?”_

The man held up his hand. It, like the rest of him, was trembling, and Clarke realized that it was with muscle weakness more than fear. Scar evaluated the tremors.

“Good enough. He'll be able to make the shot from this distance.” He started to hand the gun to the man, and then pulled it back. “Before you get any clever ideas about shooting me, or letting her go, remember that if I don't put that code into the ship every 24 hours, O2 gets cut off. Life support gets cut off. You and all of your buddies -” He waved the gun to encompass the pods surrounding them - “end up with a choice between suffocating in here and frying out there. Understand?”

Again, the man nodded. Scar gave him the gun, and the man raised it to point at Clarke. He may have been shaking with weakness, but Scar was right – any shot he fired at this distance would be enough to kill her.

So it was unfortunate for Scar when, in a split second, he tightened his hand on the gun, stopping the muscle tremors as if they were never there, swung the gun to face the other man, and shot Scar right between the eyes. He crumpled at Clarke's feet, his ice-blue eyes gazing accusingly at her, the last threat he uttered seeming to still hang halfway out of his mouth.

The man reared his head back and gazed in what looked like terror at the rows upon rows of pods surrounding him. For a moment, Clarke wondered if he had forgotten that she was there. She wondered if she should go for the gun, but couldn't tell to what degree he had been feigning his weakness, and wasn't looking to find out.

Then his eyes careened back from the pods to the gun in his hand, and he dropped it as though it had scalded him. He looked at Clarke and she was startled to see that his eyes, too, were ice-blue. His voice was hoarse when it emerged, and Clarke realized that his stitches had torn and he was bleeding through his bandage. It must have cost him terrible pain to speak.

She had already started to turn when the gun hit the floor beside him, so that his voice echoed after her as she tore down corridor after corridor of pods.

“ _Run!”_

****************

It was still an hour shy of dawn when the hangar door opened. It had felt like the longest night of Echo's life. It was too much to process that in the same night they had set off from the Ring, made it safely to Earth, been assailed by a terrifying child who somehow knew who all of them were, and discovered that Clarke was alive – but in apparently mortal danger.

So she didn't try to process it. She just rode one moment into the next, letting each new discovery crash on her like a wave, assuming that at some point the water would be calm enough for her to look around and understand the world she now lived in.

But to try to _sleep_ was out of the question. Bellamy lay beside her, his breathing even, giving an approximation of sleep that would fool anyone who hadn't spent the last several years sleeping by his side.

So when the quiet hum of machinery broke the stillness of the night, she wasn't surprised that he was first to his feet. Second was the girl, who seemed to be standing before she was fully awake. Murphy, who had remained watchful beside the girl as she dozed, scrambled up and placed a warning hand on her shoulder as the rest of them gathered silently.

“Shh. Stay here. We'll check it out.”

Bellamy, Echo and Raven drew their weapons. Bell gestured for Monty and Emori to stay by the treeline and cover them, and for Murphy and Harper to hang back with the girl. She tried to come with them, but Murphy kept a grip on her shoulder.

“Sorry, kid,” he muttered. “I have a feeling I won't be long for this world if Clarke gets off that ship and I've let something happen to you.”

She glared at him, then at the group who was moving as quickly as they dared, weapons drawn, towards the gaping opening in the ship. There was no cover; they would be in full sight of anyone who emerged. That wasn't the problem; they would face down whoever stood between them and Clarke. The problem was having enough time to take out whoever they needed to in order to buy themselves time to get in.

So when Clarke came barreling out towards them, her face bloody, and launched herself out of the hangar before it could close – as it had started to do almost as soon as it had extended fully open – she was past them before they had time to lower their weapons, and on her way toward the treeline and Madi.

****************

Someone had Madi. There were a lot of reasons that shouldn't be true: they weren't wearing a radiation suit, and no one had left the ship while she was on it, and Madi was supposed to be at the art store. Clarke couldn't make sense of it, and with so much blood in her eyes, all she could see was Madi's frightened face and the tall shape looming over her. It didn't matter – someone had her. The one time in almost six years that Clarke had left her alone, and it had happened, just like she'd known it would.

Clarke hit the man full-on, and he went down with a soft “oof.” She registered that, vaguely – he hadn't been braced for the hit, almost as if he hadn't been expecting her to attack. But once he was down, he fought back, and he fought dirty – reaching around behind him when she got him a choke-hold to grab a fistful of her hair and yank.

That was OK. She could afford to lose a little hair.

But she had underestimated the blood loss. The trees were spinning, and she was going to lose. “Madi, _run,”_ she hissed. But Madi stayed were she was, and Clarke, desperate, went to push her – and fell.

She never hit the ground. The arms, when they came, weren't Madi's, or her assailant's, and that was when Clarke knew that she was dead. Because the face looking down at her, seeming so real through the red haze and her fading consciousness, was the one that she had known all along - prayed - that she would see in the final moments before death.

He had finally come home. 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

“We should have found a way in.”

Emori sounded angry. Did she blame Madi? Madi wanted to scoot closer to Clarke, even though she hadn't woken up yet, but Bellamy hadn't left her side, and she didn't want to scoot any closer to _him_.

Instead, she went to sit next to Echo, by the fire. She knew that Echo wouldn't be mean to her, but she wouldn't be nice, either – the way Monty or Harper or even Murphy might be. She was afraid that if someone was nice to her she might burst into tears.

Echo hadn't taken her eyes of the little group clustered around Clarke. After he had caught her and scooped her up, Bellamy had brought her to Harper, as though _that_ would do any good. All of them seemed to look to Harper for some kind of answer, but Harper just pressed her own shirt against Clarke's wound, said that the bleeding was slowing, and that there was nothing to do but wait and hope that she woke up.

So Madi had them bring her back to the Rover. She wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do, but she didn't think she'd done anything right since Clarke had walked away from her, and she was homesick.

“That's like saying, 'we should have grown wings to fly in there and get her.' There _was_ no way in,” Raven snapped.

“Why are they fighting?” Madi whispered to Echo.

Echo looked startled, as though Madi had broken her concentration. “Because they're scared. It's just what people do when they're scared.” She thought for a moment. " _Some_ people."

“Bellamy isn't fighting. He isn't scared?”

Echo never looked away from where Clarke was laid out on a blanket by the fire they had lit in front of the Rover, her head in Bellamy's lap, his hand pressing a cloth against her forehead even though, as Harper had said, the bleeding had stopped a while ago. The sun had come up an hour ago, but it seemed to be struggling to break through a chilly gray haze that hung in the air. “He's more scared than any of us.”

Madi waited to see if she would be able to swallow the lump in her throat or if the tears were going to win after all. It took a moment, but she pushed the feeling back down into her chest. “Not more scared than me.”

Finally, Echo turned to look at Madi. Her glance was long and cool, as though she was weighing the girl for some purpose. “No. I guess not.” She stood suddenly, and nodded at the Rover. “You got any food in there?”

****************

Madi stood obediently and went to the back of the Rover. She wasn't supposed to share the food without Clarke's permission, but she was so far into uncharted territory, she no longer knew which rules she was supposed to follow. If Clarke woke up, the old rules would apply again, but for now it felt like a relief to have someone speaking to her with authority.

 _When_ Clarke woke up, she reminded herself fiercely.

She wasn't prepared for Echo's response when she opened the doors to the back of the Rover.

“What the _hell...?”_

Echo climbed in after her. She appeared to have forgotten about the food; she was staring instead at the drawings that covered every surface of the walls and ceiling. Were the drawings supposed to be a secret? Clarke had never said, but Madi was starting to think that there were a lot of things about the Seven that Clarke had never told her. She put her hands in the pockets of Clarke's old jacket, glad that she hadn't taken it off. Her favorites – the ones she had taken down and carried with her to play the game – were folded up in there. If Echo didn't like the drawings, if she did something to them, at least Madi still had the most important ones. Even the one of Bellamy was in there; Madi didn't like it, but she needed one of each of them in order to play.

Echo looked at her, and then at her pockets. Too late, Madi realized she should have made the movement more subtle. Echo frowned absently, but then turned back to the drawings surrounding them.

“What _is_ all of this?” She turned back to Madi. “This is how you knew who we were, right?” Before Madi could answer - “Did she draw all of these?” And again, without waiting for a response, almost as though she was talking to herself - “No pictures of Bell. Is she really that pissed at him?” Before Madi could answer, Echo went on, with a note in her voice that Madi couldn't identify. “Inner circle only, I guess. None of me.”

Madi frowned, her earlier response forgotten. “There are pictures of you. Lots.” She reached under the front seat, and pulled out a beaten old leather suitcase. Clarke kept it under the seat in front of where Madi slept; she said it was important for Madi to have her people near her. Madi had acted like she thought that that was silly, but sometimes at night she reached up over her head and put one hand on the suitcase, and it helped her sleep better.

Now, she opened it. A drawing of Echo, standing beside the man that Clarke had said could have been a great King of the Azgeda, sat on top.

Echo's breath caught as she reached out, her fingers stopping just short of the charcoal. “Roan.”

“Clarke said that it was your job to protect him. That's why she keeps you together.” Madi nodded at the suitcase. “In there. Near me, so you can protect me too.” She shrugged. “She said you would want that.”

Echo looked up, a question on her lips, when they heard the movement and voices from outside.

Clarke was awake.

****************

At some point, he was going to have to deal with everything. They were back on Earth, with no food or shelter. The last time he had landed on Earth, he'd had an army of juvenile delinquents to help him do the heavy lifting. He'd also had simpler priorities – keep his sister alive, and himself if possible. After that, do whatever the hell he wanted.

Now, there were fewer of them, and the stakes were higher. He wasn't willing to lose anyone, and this new Earth was just as unfamiliar – and maybe even more deadly – as the Earth that they'd landed on back then.

But he couldn't concentrate on that. He had vaguely registered Echo following the girl into the Rover to look for food – that was good. The others would probably want to eat, and someone should be thinking about that. As always, he was so grateful for Echo.

Because he couldn't look away from Clarke, not even for a moment, not even to think about keeping the rest of them alive. From the moment she had flown out of the ship, from the moment he had seen that she was in trouble and hurt, everything had changed. Or rather, everything had gone back to the way it had been before, and he was back on Earth before Praimfaya, with his sixth sense - whatever it was in him that was always scanning, with every nerve ending of his body, for where she was, and whether she was safe - waking up in a cascade of electric impulse.

He didn't know when it started, but he first noticed it in Polis, when her toast with Lexa went bad. As soon Lexa's guard began to show signs of the poison, Bellamy's world narrowed to one point – the cup that Clarke still held in her hand. The guard, Lexa, even the other Skaikru delegates vanished from his vision as he registered the tiny movement of the cup in her hand. He didn't know if she still planned to drink it at that point – if even then, she had some inkling that the poison was in Lexa's cup and not the liquor - or if her hand was simply still carrying out the ghost command her brain had issued a moment before everything changed. It didn't matter; the cup was moving. While everyone else seemed to be frozen, staring at the guard as he began his fall, Bellamy moved before his brain knew what his body was doing.

The cup had hit the ground before the guard did.

When he realized that not everyone had responded in the same way – that even Abby had been frozen in place, seemingly unaware of the death that her daughter might hold in her hands – Bellamy realized, too, that his job on Earth had become clear. After letting Finn go after the Grounders on his own, he no longer deserved – or trusted himself – to be a leader. Every time he tried to make a decision, he ended up hurting people - like Lincoln.

But he  _could_  protect Clarke. That was what he and his sixth sense could do better than anyone else. She was the leader that he could never be, and this was the one thing he had to offer her. So when she put his name on the list of the hundred to go into the reinforced Ark, it was OK – she needed him, and their people needed her. He didn't need to question, anymore, why he had been spared when so many had died, some at his own hand. It had been for her.

Then everything changed. The hangar doors had closed, and it became clear that he would be spared again, and that she was the one who was being left behind. It was _wrong._ He knew that she was the one who was supposed to go up with the Kru, and that he was the one who was supposed to stay behind, to catch whatever redemption he could on a wave of radioactive fire.

The feeling of wrongness never left him. But the sixth sense, slowly, did. It took a long time. For months, whenever there was danger – and there were a lot of dangerous moments in that first year – he looked for her reflexively.

But where he looked for her, he found a member of his Kru to protect, instead. And gradually, the sense had died under the weight of his new responsibilities – and yes, love – for his space family. For the family that he still thought of as hers, even after all this time.

Rather, he _thought_ that it had died. But it was only sleeping. When she came tearing out of that ship, it had come screaming back to life. When Murphy had fought back against her attack, Bellamy had been frightened of his instinct to do something to Murphy – his family, his brother – to keep him from hurting her. And when she had fallen …

It was just like before. Everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion, except for him. He caught her before she hit the ground, letting Murphy fall, gasping for breath. He didn't even  _see_ Murphy, only thought to ask if he was OK later. The world narrowed to a point – Clarke in his arms, her face black with blood; Harper's belabored ministrations; Madi's narrow back in front of them leading them to what little safety she could offer.

And now, Bellamy was scared. He had thought, a million times, of what he would give to have just five more minutes with her. He knew that his soul was tarnished – more tarnished than it had been already – by the dark deals he had been willing to offer any devil that he could have found, just to get her back for a few moments. But now that she was in front of him, he realized that he should have been more specific.

Because if these were his five minutes – if what he had been given was only one more chance to lose her – he knew that he wouldn't be able to survive it. This would be how Earth killed him at last. So when her breathing changed and her eyelashes fluttered, his own breathing stopped until she opened her eyes, as if by sheer force of will he could give her his share of oxygen.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting – anger, maybe. He would have understood that, especially after what Madi had said. It would have hurt, but he could have handled it. A part of him was hoping that she would be as happy to see him as he was to see her. For as many times as he had wished to have her back, he had never actually imagined the reunion. Never dared allow himself to. 

If he had, though, he almost certainly wouldn't have imagined her looking right through him.

“Madi?” She sat up, as though his arms, helping her, were nothing more than furniture. “ _Madi.”_

The Rover door flew open. “ _Clarke!”_ The girl flew out of the Rover as fast as Clarke had from the ship, and threw herself into Clarke's arms with a force that pushed Bellamy aside and knocked Clarke back onto the ground.

It seemed he wasn't the only one who had lightning reflexes when it came to Clarke.

“Careful!” Harper sounded anxious. “We don't want her to start bleeding again.”

Madi glowered at Harper. “Oh my god, you worry _all the time._ She's fine. Aren't you fine, Clarke?” Bellamy detected an anxious undercurrent to Madi's own voice, and his own anxiety made him search Clarke's face for signs of pain.

But Clarke's face was transformed. There was no pain, only joy at being reunited with her family.

And Madi was transformed, too. The odd, stilted little creature who had seemed to haunt them over the past day was gone, and in front of him now was a tired, relieved kid, trying to curl her adolescent body onto a lap that was not nearly big enough for it.

That was when Bellamy understood. Madi had _saved_ Clarke. When he had been spinning through space, miles away from her, Madi had kept her from being alone, kept her from giving up. Clarke may have come back to consciousness in his arms, but she had come back to _life_ the moment Madi appeared out of the Rover.

No wonder Madi hated him so much. She'd had to pick up the pieces that he had left behind.

He was starting to turn away, to give them a moment in peace, when Clarke looked up and seemed to see the rest of them for the first time. Her attention was first drawn to the last person to speak before Madi. “Wait... Harper?”

“Oh! Yeah, Clarke, your friends are back.” Madi's looked up from where she had planted herself across Clarke's lap. Clarke's leg's must be falling asleep, Bellamy thought irritably, and then became even more irritable when he realized that he was jealous of a child.  _She saved her when I couldn't._

The statement had the opposite effect that Bellamy would have anticipated. The color drained from Clarke's face again. Harper squeaked. “Catch her, catch her...”

Bellamy was there, his hand on her back, ready.

But Clarke didn't fall. She simply looked from one face to the other, slowly, as though making minute corrections to the memories that she had paraded in front of her mind's eye over the years. Bellamy hadn't needed to do that with her. Oddly, she had looked precisely how he had envisioned her in his dreams.

“Are... are we _all_ dead?” Her eyes were wide, and for a moment, she looked younger than Bellamy had ever seen her, even in those first moments on the dropship. “It was only supposed to be me.”

 _What did that mean?_ But before he could ask, Echo spoke up.

“As usual.” Her tone was harsh and dry, which, after everything, came as something of a relief. “No, Clarke, we are all very much alive. _Including_ you. And Murphy, despite your best efforts.”

“Oh....” realization seemed to dawn as Clarke turned to Murphy. “Oh, John, I'm sorry. I thought....” She frowned, seeming confused. “I don't know what I thought.”

Murphy shrugged, and spoke resignedly. “Hey, old habits die hard, right?”

“No, I...” suddenly, Clarke's brain seemed to catch up with the rest of her body. She spun around, and her eyes found his at last.

“ _Bellamy.”_

Evidently, he hadn't needed to worry about her being angry. Without letting go of Madi, she threw herself at him, so that all three of them went toppling to the ground in his arms.

****************

After Bellamy had come Raven. The rest of them got less violent, but no less warm, hugs - even Echo. She had been somewhat startled when Clarke threw her arms around her, but she supposed that six years had a way of making the heart grow fonder. She gave Clarke a perfunctory pat on the back, and turned away so that no one would see the tears of relief stinging her eyes. Madi probably noticed. That kid had laser vision.

Then there had been business to tend to, which had been a relief. Everyone could stop crying and hugging and start making inventory of their supplies.

“We've got plenty of dried meat, and the growing season never seems to end here. I mean, the fruit changes, but there's always something.” Clarke was glowing. Echo couldn't think of another way to describe it. She thought of the drawings hanging in the Rover. For all of the time she had spent thinking about all of their feelings about Clarke, it had never occurred to her that if Clarke was alive, she must have been missing her friends desperately.

Madi wrinkled her nose. “Even if it's tubers.”

Clarke grinned at her. “Yeah, even if it's tubers. My point is, we should be able to make things stretch until we check the traps again.”

Madi tugged on Clarke's hand and Clarke leaned down for Madi to whisper in her ear. Echo thought she heard the words “art store." A passcode? A secret language? She frowned at Bellamy, expecting him to share her concern at this sudden display of factionalism, but he was watching Clarke. She tried not to let this bother her.

A shadow crossed over Clarke's face. “There will be enough.” She was speaking to Madi, as though the rest of them didn't exist.

“Look, we don't need your food.” Suddenly the idea of being dependent on Clarke didn't feel so good. “We brought our own.”

Raven turned to her, alarmed. “We didn't bring food. We brought _algae._ ”

“It was good enough for us for six years.” Echo spoke coldly. Everything was changing too fast.

“It was never _good_ enough; it was all we had. They have grapes in there. _Grapes.”_

In response, Clarke grinned again - it was starting to get on Echo's nerves. What was there to be so goddamn happy about? - reached into the Rover, and brought out a basket of fruit. She tossed a bunch of grapes to Raven, and something that looked like a pear to John. He pulled out a knife and started slicing it, handing out pieces to Emori, then Harper and Monty. Clarke held out another piece of the small green fruit to Echo.

“I'm good.” She could smell it from where she stood, floral and sweet.

For the first time in what felt like forever, Bellamy looked at her. He frowned, came over to stand beside where she was leaning on the Rover, and nudged her hip with his own. “Hey. You gotta eat.”

“I _said_ I'm good.” She hadn't intended it to come out so sharply, but then, why should she try to protect him? He didn't seem terribly preoccupied with her feelings.

She was being petty, and she hated herself for it. Clarke, her eyes darting between Echo and Bellamy, frowning, began to pull back her hand with the fruit.

“Wait.” Echo reached out and took it. Her voice was tight, but she tried to smile at Clarke. “Thank you.” She went to hand it to Bellamy, but he nodded at her to eat first. As she had known he would.

Raven spoke up. “OK? We good? Echo? Your Azgeda warrior bullshit out of the way?” She came to stand on the other side of Echo and spoke more softly to cushion the harsh words. “I know it's only been us for so long but... this is Clarke. She's family. You gotta ease up.”

 _Your family._ Echo wondered how long Spacekru was going to last in this new world. Skaikru roots ran deep. She met Emori's gaze across the clearing, and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.

She took a deep breath. If anyone was going to blow up her family, it wasn't going to be her. “I'm good. Sorry.” Raven raised her eyebrows. Echo didn't apologize often.

Clarke had tactfully wandered off to tend to the fire, Madi by her side. Since Clarke had woken up, the girl had been like a silent shadow. Now, Clarke looked at the sun in the sky, beginning to burn off the mist.

 _Weather._ How long since Echo had thought about weather? For a moment, she turned her own face towards the rising sun, and tried to lose herself in it.

“Did anyone sleep last night?” Clarke addressed it to everyone, but they knew she was talking about Madi.

“She got a couple of hours,” John nodded at the younger girl, whose lip jutted out.

“I'm _not_ tired.”

But Clarke didn't need to do the negotiating that Bellamy had. She knelt down in front of Madi and spoke in a stern voice. “You're going to lie down for a couple of hours. If you're not tired, you'll lie there and stare at the ceiling. Got it?”

Madi sighed. “Got it.” She rolled her eyes, but in her voice was relief at having her parent back. Echo felt a little bit guilty for having treated her like a small adult over the past 12 hours. It must have felt like being temporarily raised by wolves - with the exception of Bellamy, whom she seemed to hate.

Clarke and Madi disappeared into the back of the Rover, Clarke with a “be right back.”

The rest settled in around the fire, savoring the fruit.

“So,” said Monty, after a long moment of silence. “We gonna talk about it?”

_The return of Clarke the savior? Bellamy's inability to concentration on anything else? Me, fucking losing it? The fact that, underneath it all, I'm so relieved she's alive that I could cry, and I hate it, because everything feels so much cleaner when it's just me and my clan against the world?_

No one answered. Finally, Echo - wondering if they were each going through their own internal list of things unspoken- broke the silence.

“Talk about what?”

“About the giant, apparently hostile, prison ship that seems to have landed right on the edge of what looks to be the only arable, habitable part of this planet, and the fact that we have absolutely no idea who they are or what they want?”

****************

“So?” Clarke patted the blankets around Madi, as if afraid that if she left any corners untucked, the girl might slip away.

“So, what?” Madi had already rolled over into her accustomed sleeping position.

“So... how was it? You know... with them?” Clarke nodded towards the door of the Rover, and the group beyond. She knew she should let Madi drift off, but she needed to know. It wasn't as if she had _never_ imagined that Madi might meet them on her own – just that she had assumed that, if that were the case, it would be because Clarke was dead. She didn't think she'd have a chance to talk to Madi afterwards about her first impressions.

“Oh. Well...” Madi rolled over on her back and stared up at the ceiling. “John tells really good stories.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“They're not... they're not quite like the way you made them seem.”

_Because I wanted you to have the best of them. Because, if the day ever came that they stepped off of that ship and I wasn't there, I wanted to make sure that you walked toward, not away from them. That was more important than anything else._

“Oh, no?”

“Not really. They're... _realer._ ”

“More real,” Clarke automatically corrected. “Well, I guess that makes sense. What did you think of...” She couldn't bring herself to say his name, “Raven?”

“I don't know yet.” Clarke tried not to show the gut punch. She had so wanted for Madi to feel about Raven the way she did. “Echo is my favorite, though.”

“Oh... oh yeah?” Clarke's hands stopped, hovering above the blankets as though unsure how to proceed. Why did this thought make her stomach tighten? She thought of the easy warmth between Echo and Bellamy, how he had gone to her when she seemed upset over... fruit? Clarke still wasn't sure what had happened, only that Echo had needed Bellamy, and Bellamy had been there. Without hesitation.

But what the hell did that have to do with Madi? Or with anything, for that matter? So Bellamy and Echo had fallen in love. She had half-believed that that was what would happen, during those six long years. They were both leaders, both warriors. They clearly made sense together.

So why had she only _half_ believed it? Because the other half of her had believed....

She sat back, unwilling to complete the thought. Madi was frowning at her. “Is that not right? To have Echo as a favorite?”

 _Shit._ This was probably bad parenting, to project her own hang-ups on the first relationships Madi had formed in four years. “No, Madi, you can like - or love - whoever you want. If Echo is your favorite, there's probably a really good reason for it.”

“She's not _your_ favorite.”

Clarke avoided the statement. “I don't have a favorite.”

Madi rolled over, so her back was again to Clarke. Her voice, when it came, was muffled. “Yes, you do.”

“What?” Clarke thought she must have misunderstood her.

Madi turned to face her one more time. “Nothing. 'Night.”

And for the first time since she had found Clarke in the wilderness, she curled up and went to sleep without asking for a story.

****************

It was only after Clarke joined them around the smoldering fire that they began to discuss the ship in earnest.

“They know Clarke's here, but they don't know about the rest of us. Does the name ring a bell with anyone? Eligius?” When no one responded, Bellamy went on, “That used to happen on Old Earth. Private corporations running prisons. But why is it landing now? Where's it been for the past 100 years? … Clarke? What is it?”

The memory hit her out of the blue. First being knocked unconscious, then finding Madi and her friends, she hadn't had time to think.... “It's a life support ship. They're all in suspended animation. But... that's not all.” She hurried on before the news could start its own train of questions and speculations. “How long since I left the ship?”

The others looked at each other. “Six, maybe seven hours. You were out for a while,” Raven offered.

“Then we have, at _most,_ 18 hours to do something before everyone on that ship dies.”

“Wait, what?”

Clarke had been avoiding looking at Bellamy directly. Something about seeing his face – changed, softer and more open than it had been six years ago, but still so completely _him_ – had started an ache deep in her chest that she wasn't ready to deal with yet. But now, with something to focus on outside of themselves, she found herself responding to him automatically. They worked well together; that was what mattered now.

“The man who first brought me on board said something about a code. He said he has to enter it every 24 hours, or the life support and oxygen filtration systems will shut down. It must be some kind of security measure.”

“So?” Clarke knew that she wasn't making much sense, and Emori had never been one for patience.

“So, that man is dead now. The other man – the one who let me go – killed him. And _that_ man doesn't know the code.”

“Are you sure?” John's eyes were bright. He and Emori exchanged looks.

“Yes. It was what the other man was holding over him to make him keep me hostage. I think the other man knew that he would want to let me go, but he thought that self-preservation would win out.” Clarke looked down, thinking of that desperate voice echoing after her as she ran. “It didn't.”

“Sounds like problem solved, to me.” Emori sat back.

“What?” Clarke looked at her, then around the group. To her surprise, Harper was nodding her head in agreement. Echo was stone-faced. Even Raven was avoiding her gaze.

She was afraid of what would happen if she turned to Bellamy. Instead, she looked pleadingly at Monty, who was looking between the others uncertainly.

“Is this what it's come to? We slaughter entire groups of people for no reason?”

Monty was silent, but Harper responded. “ _We_ aren't slaughtering them. We're just – letting things progress the way they would if we had never arrived.”

“But if _I_ had never arrived, that man would still be in suspended animation.” _Or dead._ “He never would have had to make the choice to let me go at the cost of his own life. Are we seriously going to let him die, after he saved me?” Finally, she turned to Bellamy. But he was surveying the circle.

Monty spoke up. “No – I mean, we're not going to _let_ anything happen. We can try. But there's no guarantee...”

“There's _never_ a guarantee. But we always try. I mean, don't we?” She tried again. “These are _humans._ Doesn't that make them our people?”

“It's a prison ship. They're criminals.” Bellamy's voice was soft. She wondered if it was how he really felt, or if he felt obligated to argue both sides for the sake of the SpaceKru around the circle who were conflicted. _His_ Kru.

Well, they weren't hers. Not if they were willing to do this. “Seriously? _So were we._ That's why the Ark sent us down here to die. Because we were expendable. Are we saying the same about these people?”

“We're _saying_ that they're a threat. That if we do save them, we might regret it when they come for this land. Or for us. They're not immune to the radiation, are they? And you're a nightblood. How do we know they won't come after you again?” Clarke saw Bellamy stiffen, but she recognized Emori's tactic for what it was – manipulation. Emori wasn't worried about Clarke; Emori, as usual, was worried about Emori. _Smarten up, Bellamy. Don't let her play you_. “How do we know we aren't just setting up another Mount Weather situation?” Emori turned to John. “Right?" 

She clearly expected agreement, but John just looked thoughtful and turned away.

Raven spoke up at last, and Clarke's heart was in her throat until she heard the words. “Clarke's right. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again, trying to protect ourselves at the cost of everyone else. I'm ready to start doing better than the people of Old Earth. Who's with me?” Raven, oddly, scanned the area around the fire until she found a piece of curved bark, and placed it on the ground. She looked around again, but apparently not finding what she was looking for, instead drew a circle on the ground next to the piece of bark. The SpaceKru, as they appeared to recognize what she was doing, each picked a pebble up off the ground. Monty picked up two and handed one to Clarke.

“First time in 6 years we might have a tie,” he said, looking uncertain. Bellamy shrugged.

“Then we keep talking until someone changes their mind.”

Monty tossed his pebble on the bark, where Raven had placed hers. “I'm with you and Clarke. Yes, sometimes we have to make hard decisions, but if we start letting people die because they _might_ harm us in the future...” he shook his head. “We wouldn't be as bad as the Mountain Men. We'd be _worse_ than them.”

Finally, Clarke realized what she was looking at.

They were _voting._ About whether to try to save the hundreds of souls on board the ship or stand by and do nothing while they died.

Clarke dropped her pebble on the ground. “Madi and I,” she gritted out, “are not a democracy. We'll be doing what we can to help those people. We're leaving here in an hour, with or without you. I hope you all...” she looked witheringly at the bark. “Voteto join us.”

Quietly, so as to not wake Madi, she opened the door to the Rover, climbed in, and pulled out her charcoal and paper. She wasn't drawing now; if she was going to figure out how to either crack a code on a secure prison ship, or wake up and radioactivity-proof every person on the ship, she was going to need a plan.

It was only another minute before Bellamy joined her. “It wasn't close,” he said. “We're coming.”

“How kind of you.”

“Look – I know what it looks like.” His voice was partly defensive, partly annoyed.

“It _looks_ like you would have been willing to let those people die if the majority decided that that was best for the group.”

“Well? What's the alternative?”

“Letting everyone make their own decision, for one.”

“And then a few of us go it alone, and are weaker for it?”

“Better than not going in at all and knowing that you let this happen, just because the _vote_ didn't go your way.”

Their voices had climbed in volume and intensity, and now Bellamy took a deep breath. “Clarke, this is how we got by up there. The Ring is a big place, but when you're with the same seven people all the time...little resentments begin to add up. It was important for everyone to have a voice.”

“Even if that voice is saying to let hundreds of people die?”

“Even if that voice is saying to protect what we have instead of jeopardizing it, yes. Even if that voice is scared. _Especially_ when that voice is scared. Because scared voices that don't get listened to turn angry. And that's how you get Old Earth, and the Old Ark, and ….” he lowered his eyes. “Even Pike.”

“Well, that's very _civilized_ of you. And I'm really glad that you got the chance to be civilized enough to entertain the idea of mass murder. But down here -” she went on through his attempted objection - “we didn't _get_ to be civilized. We just had to _survive._ And surviving means that every life counts.” She looked at Madi, the girl's breathing remaining steady and even throughout the argument. Could she really be sleeping through this, or was she faking? Too late now. “So we're not going to _vote_ on whether those lives are worth it. We're just going to save them. And when we're done with that....” She shook her head and looked down.

“What?” His voice was tight. He was no longer trying to defend himself against her charges. She knew that she was being unfair, but it was too hard to be on opposite sides, now, after all this time. After so long of wanting him to come home.

It had been better before, when she talked to him every day and he didn't get a chance to talk back.

“Maybe we should go back to the way things have been. I'll give you guys food, and show you where to find more, but....”

“Clarke.” His voice shook. “You can't be serious. Split up?”

“Bellamy, six years is a long time. It's longer than we were...” _Us. Whatever that was._ “It's longer than you were on Earth. By a lot. It's stupid to pretend that we can go back to the way things were.”

“I'm not the one being stupid, Clarke. You're seriously doing this? Forget about me. You're going to do this to Raven? To Monty?” Now it was her turn to look down, but she didn't reply. “Clarke, you're our _family._ We don't have to pretend that everything is the same, but we can't pretend like you're not, either.”

Clarke's head snapped up. “Family?” She knew that she was going to regret it, but something about the word had finally made the ache in her chest overflow and spill over. “We're not, Bellamy. We're not family.”

He looked like she had slapped him. “What?”

“Bellamy, what does Emori like to do in the mornings?”

It took him by surprise, she could see. Good. Keep him from seeing how close to tears she was.

“What?”

“Emori. On the Ring, what did she like to do in the mornings?”

“She didn't. She's not a morning person. Neither is John. They only get up when they have watch.”

Clarke nodded, as if this confirmed something. “What about Monty and Harper?”

Bellamy frowned. He didn't want to answer, she knew, afraid of the trap that he was sure she was setting for him. “Monty always checks the aquafarm first thing in the morning. Always. Harper likes … _liked_ … to go watch Earth float by for a while.”

“Raven?”

“Clarke, what is this -”

“Just answer the question. What does Raven like to do in the mornings?”

He sighed. “Find me, tell me something vital that needs to be fixed on the ship and the hundred reasons that she'll never be able to do it and how that's somehow my fault, and then go off and start fixing it anyway.”

In spite of herself, Clarke smiled. Man, she had missed Raven.

“What about Echo?”

 _That depends on whether one of us has watch._ If not, Echo liked to stay in bed. With him. She decidedly _was_ a morning person, and had turned him into one, too.

She must have seen the answer on his face, because she looked away. “Never mind. OK, Bellamy, what do I like to do in the mornings?”

“What?”

“You said we were family. You know what everyone else does in the morning, because you've lived with them for six years, day in, day out. What do I do every morning?”

“Clarke, that's not...”

“Isn't it? You don't know what I do in the mornings, because you and I nave never shared a life. Not really. Bell, is family someone you've gone to war with, again and again until every day is just another math problem, the people you can't save subtracted from the people that you can? Is family someone who's seen you so broken down, so at your worst, that you can't even stand to look back on memories of your time together because, if you really accept that you were ever that person, you don't know how to go on?”

Bellamy was silent. Clarke wanted him to say something, and she didn't. Because what could he say? He knew that she was right.

“Or is family who you've laughed with, shared meals with, learned things with, grown with? Bell, you and I were so close – when we were _surviving._ And I missed you so much.” The words themselves brought tears to her eyes, the intensity of the longing like a dagger in her chest now. “But don't we both deserve something better, now? Don't we deserve to be with the people who were there with us when we learned to _live?”_

 _Say something. Tell me I'm wrong_.

But he didn't say anything, because she wasn't wrong.

She nodded at the door to the Rover. “Tell the others I'll be out in a second. I'm just going to wake Madi up.” _If she hasn't been awake, listening to every word I've said._

Bellamy nodded and began to turn away. Finally, it was too much for her. She had to know. 

“Bellamy?” There must have been something in her voice, because when he turned back, he looked hopeful. “Which way did you vote?”

The hope flickered and went out like candles being shuttered behind a window. He turned away. “If you have to ask that, maybe you're right. Maybe we don't know each other like I thought.”

****************

When Bell climbed out of the Rover, everything looked different. The sun had risen all the way, but the haze hadn't burned off. Maybe it never would – maybe that was the way of the world now. This world that changed every time he thought he had found his footing.

The others looked inquiringly at him. “She'll be out in a minute.”

John frowned. “We don't have all day.” He seemed especially tense. Bellamy had been surprised when John had voted to try to rescue the prisoners – after all, Emori's preference had been clear, and in six years, it was the only time he had cast a vote against her.

“I _said_ she'll be out.” Bellamy knew that John didn't deserve to be snapped at, but it had been the kinder option, because what he _felt_ like doing was hitting someone. Anyone.

So she _was_ angry. Furious. He had no doubt that all of this talk about what did and didn't constitute family was only an excuse. She was angry with him for leaving her, and the worst part was, he couldn't blame her.

Raven came over to where he was crouching by the fire, absently drawing a diagram of the ship. They were, after all, going to have to come up with a plan at some point, whether or not Clarke chose to abandon them afterward.

“What the hell happened in there?” She nodded toward the Rover.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you went in there with your 'Clarke is alive' afterglow alive and well -”

“I don't have a -”

“Shut up. And when you came out, you looked like you were going to punch poor John for pointing out the obvious. We _are_ working with limited time here.”

Bellamy sighed. Usually, when Raven gave him shit, he gave it right back, but now he was tired. “She's going to leave us after this.”

“What? Who?”

"Clarke."

It took a moment for it to sink in, and then Raven looked around, pointedly. “And go _where?”_

“I don't know. She was really pissed about the vote, and about...” _Everything._ “She said that we should go our separate ways. That we're not family anymore because I don't know what she does in the mornings.”

“Because you don't know _what?_ ” The look on Raven's face would have been funny if Bellamy's world hadn't come crashing down two minutes ago.

“Because I don't know what she does in the morning, and I know what all of you do. She says families live together, and all we ever did was survive together.”

Raven's face darkened. He wondered if he should have told her that last part, but then, he wasn't really in the mood to protect Clarke at the moment. “Oh that's _all_ we've done, is it?”

He shrugged again, but she was already storming toward the Rover.

****************

“You wake me up, and then we have breakfast, and then we do lessons except when there are no lessons, and then sometimes we go to the river and sometimes we go to the art store and sometimes we just stay here and do stories.” Madi's voice, thin and slightly high-pitched, had emerged from her blankets before the Rover door had fully closed behind Bellamy.

“What?” Clarke was genuinely puzzled.

“That's what we do in the mornings.”

“Oh... yeah, I know.” She was still thinking about the look on Bellamy's face. Had she gone too far? But it had hurt so much to see them all crouched over that fire, weighing the fate of hundreds in their hands... in the old days, she and Bellamy would have made the call, and the others could have joined or not. She had never wanted the burden of leadership, but she wasn't prepared for how lonely it would feel to lose it.

“I just wanted you to know that I know.” Madi rolled over to look at Clarke. Her eyes were wide.

“Mads, what are you talking about? Are you OK?” Clarke reached out to feel Madi's forehead. Was she feverish?

“I don't want you to think that you and I aren't family. You said that we had to _survive_ down here, and then you said that families don't just survive together. But I know what we do in the mornings, so that makes us family, right?” Madi's face was pale and anxious.

Oh... oh _no._ She had definitely been listening, and what she had heard was not at all what Clarke had intended to say. But then... what had Clarke intended to say, if not that? 

“Oh, Mads, of _course_ you and I are family. That's not what I mean at _all._ Nothing could ever change that, do you understand? _Nothing._ ” Clarke stroked Madi's hair, sweaty from sleep – she was the warmest sleeper Clarke had ever known – and pushed it off her forehead.

Madi still looked worried. “But you decided that you and Bellamy aren't family anymore. What if you decide that about me someday?”

“I couldn't. That could never happen.”

“But you love Bellamy more than anyone else in the world except for me. If you can decide that about him, how come you can't decide it about me?”

“Because... I didn't _decide_ it.” She decided to let go the part about loving Bellamy more than the others. How had she given Madi that idea? “It just happened. It's just something that happened, without my meaning it to, over a long time. But that could _never_ happen with you and me.”

The worry had cleared from Madi's face, but something else had replaced it – confusion. Doubt. “Clarke – I think you might be...”

Before she could find the words, the Rover door flew open.

“So we're not _family_ anymore, I hear?”

Clarke had never seen Raven so angry. Not when she found out that Clarke was sleeping with Raven's first love; not when Bellamy destroyed the radio that she had risked her life to bring to earth; not even when Clarke had killed Finn.

“Raven, I didn't mean...”

“Oh, I know what you _meant._ And now you're going to listen to what _I_ mean. You are _not_ going to take another member of my family away from me, Clarke Griffin, do you understand?” She was shaking. “I lost Finn. I lost _Sinclair._ Who knows whether I've lost Abby.”

The name cut through Clarke like a knife. It was unfair of her, she knew, not to have thought of it sooner, not to have told Raven everything she knew about Abby - which was painfully little. Her own mom was the closest thing that Raven had ever had to a real mother. But before she could reply, Raven was going on.

“And _you_ are my fucking family. You are an asshole, and you are self-absorbed, and you _never_ appreciate how much people love you -” Clarke opened her mouth to reply, but Raven went on, “Do _not_ debate me on this. I would have given _anything_ for a mom like Abby. I would have given _anything_ for Finn to love me the way he loved you. And those people out there -” she gestured wildly behind her, encompassing the world beyond the Rover - “spent the last six _years_ missing you. And now, boo-hoo, we don't know what you like for breakfast?"

"Raven, you're missing the point."

"No, Clarke, _you're_ missing the point. You feel left out because we managed to find a way to hobble along without you for the past six years, so you're going to take your surprise daughter that you still haven't explained – who, by the way, is _my family now too_ – and leave? Because, what? Because it hurts too much to be with us? It hurts too much that we left you? _What?_ What is so goddamned hard about just being happy to have found us again?”

Clarke was breathing quickly. “Because ...” she could barely get the words out, and she didn't even know that they were true until she said them. “Because I _can't_ lose you again, Raven. I  _can't._ ”

As she said it, she realized why everything being different had felt so terrible. Because it was like losing them, a little bit at a time, all over again. And she couldn't do that. It would kill her, and Madi needed her.

This seemed to take the wind out Raven's sails. She slumped to her knees, so suddenly that it took Clarke by surprise. For the first time, she seemed to take in the drawings surrounding her. For a moment she just gazed at them; then she crawled over to where Clarke was sitting, her knees drawn up to her chest, and knelt next to her. She leaned in so that their foreheads were touching.

“I missed you, too.” She was whispering, as though there was anyone who hadn't heard everything they'd already said. Clarke could feel the heat of Raven's tears on her own face. “Abby sent me to this stupid planet to find you once, and I will keep coming back for you as many times as it takes, because you are my _sister_. Do you understand?”

Clarke nodded, but couldn't find words that seemed adequate. “I'm sorry.”

“I know you are.” Raven sniffed, and pulled away. “Oh, and Clarke?”

“Yeah?”

“Don't ever tell me that I don't know what Clarke Griffin does in the morning.”

"Oh, really?" Clarke was beginning to feel like herself again. Raven had that effect on people. 

"Yeah." The grin was a flash of lightening. “She wakes up and finds some ass to kick.”

And just like that, she was out of the Rover as Clarke was still wiping her own eyes. She was almost afraid to turn to Madi while she was still feeling so raw, but when she did, she saw that Madi herself was grinning.

“You were right.” Madi grabbed her jacket and went to follow Raven out of the Rover.

“Wait, about what?” Clarke was pretty sure that the last five minutes had been about proving her definitively _wrong._

“About Raven. She's _definitely_ my favorite.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the little posting delay... life, amiright? Why can't my job and everyone in the world understand that I'm TRYING to write fanfic here?  
> xo

They hadn't come in a long time. At least, it _seemed_ like a long time. Usually Octavia measured time by the number of people she could make, and she had made more than ten since she had seen them last. That seemed like a lot.

They would come, though. They always did. The water got low, and they filled it again. Octavia ate what they brought her, and then they brought more. It was the new law of her world. So few laws held out for long, but this one never seemed to fail.

In the early days, she hadn't wanted to eat or drink. Food had repulsed her, and the water burned on her tongue. But Lincoln said she needed to, and it had been easier to obey than to argue with him. She hated arguing with him, now that all she had of him was his voice in her head.

She heard a scuffling above, and looked up, expectantly. Nothing.

Just another animal.

_Maybe. Or maybe other people._

What people?

_Bad people._

Octavia backed up against the wall where her bed was. A long time ago, the fear wouldn't have mattered. Her body had been a powerful weapon, and she would have used it against these bad people.

Now, when she was afraid, she went under the bed. The closeness of the space reminded her of something, but she didn't know what. Something from a long time ago. She didn't let herself think about things like that.

There were no guns here, but that was okay. She hadn't used a gun in a long time. Linc said that they had taken the guns because they were afraid she was going to hurt herself. She thought that was funny. The underground people had already hurt her so much. She couldn't hurt herself any worse.

The thought made her clutch the figure that she had been working on. A tiny woman with snakes instead of hair. She didn't know where the ideas for her figures came from, any more than she knew where Linc's voice came from. She just knew that every morning she woke up, found a piece of metal that looked right in the scrap heap that they kept stocked for her, and sat down to create something out of it. Sometimes stories came into her head while she was working on them. The stories were told to her in a deep voice, but not Linc's voice. She would listen to the stories, but she didn't let herself think about the voice. 

She thought it might be from long ago, too. From the time she didn't let herself think about.

There were a lot of things that Octavia didn't think about. Her mind was a big, dark house, and she kept the doors to all of the rooms closed, and locked. As long as she kept herself to the very top floor, she would be OK. Sometimes there were rumblings on the floors below, when her ghosts got restless. Those times she went under the bed, and lay still, telling herself stories until the rumblings went away. Someone had taught her to do that a long time ago. 

Her hand was bleeding now. She looked at it in surprise. Red. Her blood was red. Not like the others.

That was a bad thought – there was a door behind that thought. She turned her attention back to the figure, warming the metal over the candle flame until it became workable, and twisting it gently into shape.

Usually she would cool them in the water when she was done so that they wouldn't lose their shapes, but the water was getting low, and Linc said that she had to save it to drink. That was okay. When they came, they would refill it, and then she could use it however she wanted.

They would come soon. They always did.

 

****************

 

 

When Clarke followed Madi out of the Rover, her face was tear-stained, but the others pretended not to notice. Bellamy avoided her gaze altogether.

So Raven had gotten through to her when he couldn't. Well, that was fine. As Clarke herself had pointed out, things had changed. Clearly, he wasn't what she needed anymore. Maybe he should learn to give her a little space. 

So when she came to sit by the fire, he didn't look up, but continued to sketch the ship in the dirt. She frowned at it.

“There are no entrances, and we have no information. We're going to need to get inside if we're going to figure out how to hack the system.” Her voice was businesslike. She didn't want to revisit their conversation any more than he did.

“That's not an option. Last time you were in there, they had a gun to your head. Who's to say it'll go any better this time?”

“This time I'll have you guys backing me up.”

Raven had joined them now, falling into the easy, familiar rhythm of trying to solve the unsolvable. “What do you mean, we'll be backing you up? Why would we send you in there in the first place?”

“Look, the one guy we know to be conscious in there knows me - well, has seen me once, and didn't kill me. We don't know how he'll react to one of you.”

“That's stupid.” Bellamy hadn't intended it to come out so harshly, but he wasn't exactly sorry, either. “What's to prevent it from ending exactly the way it did before, with you behind an impenetrable door and us on the other side, useless?”

“Plus, we don't know if that guy is still the one guy in there.” Monty spoke up from beside Raven. The others had come over to eye the – pretty useless, Bellamy had to admit – diagram in the dirt. “What if there are others who aren't feeling so charitable? What if someone else woke up and took him out? It doesn't seem like there's a real clear chain of leadership in there.”

Clarke sighed, and Bellamy could see her struggling to accept that they were right. She was trying, but six years of going solo was a hard habit to break. It should have made him feel some empathy for her, but for some reason, seeing the toll her solitude had taken just pissed him off even more. “Clarke, we don't have time for you to be a martyr. I know that's your favorite role, but you're going to have to share this time.”

She looked up, stung. He could feel even Echo start at his cruelty.

Well, maybe he felt like being a little cruel – the way _she_ had been when she threatened to take off on him.

Clarke blinked, and when he didn't apologize or say anything to soften the blow, her expression hardened. “Well then, maybe you want to step up by sharing an idea about what we _can_ do, instead of shooting down everything I say.”

The air around them was thick with tension. Bell could feel Emori take a step back, her survivor's instinct warning her away from the conflict. Echo and Raven were frowning at him, and Monty looked wide-eyed and worried. Murphy seemed to be amused - but then, Murphy would be.

Madi's voice, when it came, was small and puzzled.

“Why don't we just use the control panel in the back?”

“What?” Bellamy, startled, turned to her, and saw others doing the same.

“Raven saw it when she was checking out the ship before.”

Raven frowned at her, and spoke slowly. “That's true, I did. How did you...”

“Why don't we use that to get in? Then you don't have to fight about who gets to go. You can all go in together.” She came to stand beside Clarke, and Bellamy couldn't help but notice that she was glaring at him.

“Raven, why didn't you mention that when we were trying to go in after Clarke?” Echo, as usual, had her mind on the battle plan.

“Because it wouldn't have worked. We would have made a ton of noise trying to pry it open, and once we did, there would be no guarantee that we'd have access to anything.”

“But it's a chance. And if we have access to the controls, maybe we can figure out how to delay the O2 reset without needing full access to the ship.”

“You mean, maybe _I_ can figure it out.” Raven rolled her eyes. “Why do I feel like this is going to end with me electrocuting myself inside the wall of a prison ship while you all stand around and yell at me to go faster?”

Emori, relaxed now that the tension had been broken, grinned. “Hey, you know I'll be in there with you. Holding a flashlight and poking at wires and whatnot.” On the Ring, Emori had taken quickly to mechanics and engineering, and had become an apprentice to Raven. Bellamy knew that Raven tried not to show how desperately proud she was to be a mentor to someone, as Sinclair had been to her.

“If we can't reset the O2 generators, we're going to have to come up with a plan B. Protect them from the radiation somehow.” Emori seemed to have forgotten that she hadn't wanted to rescue the group on the ship. As with Raven, mechanical problems had a way of trumping anything else on her mind.

“Just how bad is the radiation?” Bellamy was watching Clarke, noticing the careful impassivity of her face. “You said it killed that man when he got a tear in his suit?”

“Yes – or at least, it sure looked like radiation poisoning, and it happened fast. I think the levels are low enough that Skaikru and Grounders can survive, but people who haven't been genetically selected for it-”

“Mountain Men, the Sequel,” John offered.

“- can't tolerate it.”

Bellamy frowned. He had been unwilling to ask the question, assuming that if there were good news, Clarke would have told him before now. But at this point, it seemed odd to talk around it.

“Clarke... I assume that if Wonkru had come up from the bunker, you would have told us? But clearly the radiation levels have dropped to livable levels, at least for us. Where is everyone?” He hadn't imagined it – Clarke's eyes flickered downward. She was afraid to tell him something.

“ _Clarke.”_ Raven's voice was sharp. He wasn't the only one who could read her. “What don't we know?”

Clarke nodded to Madi. “Go load up the water into the Rover.”

“But, Clarke....” Madi's voice held a whine that Bellamy remembered from Octavia's younger days.

“ _Now,_ Madi.” Clarke's tone left no room for debate. When the younger girl had left, she turned back to the group.

“They haven't come up because they don't know that the radiation has fallen.” Her tone was weary.

“But they have monitors set up everywhere, feeding into that central log. One or two of them could have gone down in six years, but not all of them. How can they not know?” Monty had helped to set up the monitors. Bellamy was willing to bet that not many of them would have failed.

“Because all of the monitors _did_ go down. Madi and I made sure of it.”

“ _What?”_ Harper hadn't spoken since the vote, but now her voice was shaking. “Clarke, _why?_ How could you? Those are our friends down there! _Your_ friends!”

“Not just friends.” Bellamy spoke in a carefully controlled tone, afraid of what he might say. He couldn't look at her. “Clarke, are you telling me that you left Octavia to rot underground? She's still under there?”

At last, Clarke raised her eyes to meet his. “No. Octavia's not still under there.”

The world seemed to still. He couldn't do it. He couldn't ask the question.

As usual, Echo was there when he needed her. “Where the hell is she, Clarke?”

Clarke must have realized too late what it had sounded like, and spoke in a rush. “She's alive, Bell! She's alive, I swear. I'll bring you to her. Soon.”

Bellamy didn't register the wrongness of that answer until later. Why would he have to be “brought” to Octavia? If she was above ground, why hadn't he seen her yet? Why wouldn't she be with Clarke?

He stood up. “Now. Bring me to her _now.”_

“Bellamy, I can't. Not like this. There's a lot to explain and... it's not so simple.”

He felt sick. Of course, Octavia had been on his mind since they landed, but he had known that if Clarke had any knowledge of her, she would have told him right away. He had  _known_ that, as surely as he knew his own name. It wouldn't even have occurred to him to doubt it.

Then again, it also wouldn't have occurred to him to doubt that Clarke would never willingly allow herself to be separated from them after six years apart, and she had been so quick with her idea to split up. What else did he think he "knew" that would be proven wrong?

He was pretty sure he hated new Earth.

“Hey, I'm sorry to bring this up – I really am – but the people on that ship are going to die any minute. We don't know when the 24 hour clock started. We really don't have time for this.” Murphy, a surprising voice of reason, turned to Clarke. “Look, is there a reason - a _good_ reason - that you tampered with the radiation monitors in order to keep every single member of the human race that we know about, other than us and the poor suckers on that prison ship, stuck underground for a year longer than they had to be?”

“More like eight months, by the time the radiation had fallen to livable levels, but...yes.”

“Great. Will you tell us about it sometime?”

“ _Yes._ ” Clarke spoke fervently, looking back at Bellamy. “I swear.”

“And....” Murphy looked hesitantly at Bellamy's stony face before going on. “Is there a reason you decided not to tell Bellamy that his sister, the sister who brought him to this stupid planet in the first place, the sister he would literally die for, is above ground and presumably accessible to him?”

“There is...a reason.”

“OK. Is it a good one?”

“I certainly think so. Bell, please. I know things are messed up right now. Please just trust me for a little bit longer.”

24 hours ago, he had known he could trust her. Known it with every fiber of his being. But now... He stood still and silent, trying to decide. What would it mean for him to let this go now? What if Octavia was in trouble, and needed him?

It was Echo who finally spoke, placing her hand on the small of his back. “Bell. She doesn't deserve for you to lose faith in her now. Not after everything.”

 _Not after you left her to burn._ Whose voice was it, anymore, in his head? Ghost Clarke's? Madi's? His own? He couldn't tell, but he knew it was right. Clarke _didn't_ deserve this – any of it. Especially not the rage that he seemed to feel at her just for having gone on with her life without him. It shouldn't be surprising that she had some secrets - six years was a long time.

But he couldn't help but wonder why she would still keep them, even knowing how much power they had to hurt him.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and sat back down.

But Clarke still looked worried. “No, I think I'm the one who should be sorry. I thought I could make this work, but I don't think I can.”

“Clarke, I swear to God, if you try to break up with us again...” Raven had sat as still as a statue while processing the news about Wonkru, but now she came back to life.

“What?” Clarke looked at Raven, startled. “Oh, no, not _that._ I mean - this is taking too long, rescuing the prisoners. We're going to run out of time. I think Bellamy is right. I think I need to bring him to Octavia. Now.”

****************

  
She realized as soon as she said it that she'd again made it sound more dire than it was. His eyes were barely a degree away from panic. But how could she explain it without hurting him?

 _No._ She wasn't being honest with herself. It was going to hurt him no matter what. What she wanted was a way to explain it without him hating her, and that might not be possible.

Either way, they had run out of time. Their supply run had originally been scheduled for yesterday, and even that had been cutting it closer than they usually did, but there was a lot of game moving through the area, and Clarke had wanted to take advantage of it before setting off. Then... well, then things had gotten away from her.

Now, she called Madi over. “We're going to the art supply store. Is the water loaded?” At the mention of the store, Echo's head snapped up, and she looked at Clarke suspiciously. _So much for faith._

Madi's face brightened, then almost as immediately fell. “What about the prisoners?”

“Raven's on it, and she's got the others to help her. If it can be done, they'll do it. They don't need us.” Clarke made her voice brighter than she felt. She wasn't at all comfortable leaving her friends to the mercy of the ship, assuming they were successful. But there was no other choice. The last time Octavia had run out of water, she had panicked, and it had been three months before they got her to speak again.

“Hey, I'll be the judge of that.” Raven looked down at the diagram, which she had taken over from Bellamy. “Actually, I really _don't_ need you. I need Emori and Monty as gophers -”

“Technical support,” Monty corrected.

“- and a couple extra hands to hold guns.”

“That's us, guys.” John came to stand between Harper and Echo. “Good to know they value us for our intellect.”

“Other than that... Oh shit. Wait. Do any of you guys remember how to get back to the ship from here?” Raven looked at the others. “When we were on our way here, I was kind of too focused on Clarke to pay much attention to where we were going.”

“I can find it. It's only about an hour west of here.” Echo spoke confidently, as though it hadn't been six years since she had had to find her way anywhere on Earth.

“No, Echo, you're with us.” Clarke had been thinking about it, and Bellamy was going to need Echo when they got to the store. Her hand on the small of his back had seemed to drain the tension from his body when Clarke was tongue-tied, unable to do anything but make him more enraged; unable to make him understand the choices she'd had to make while he was gone. A small inner voice raged and wept about how unfair it was that, after everything, Echo got to be the good guy – standing up for _her_ to Bellamy, of all people. But there was no time for that now.

“I don't think...” Echo spoke slowly, at the same time that Bellamy said, “No, they need her here.”

“Would you please listen to me? I know what I'm talking about. Echo needs to come with us.” On some level, she had known all along that it was going to come to this, and the knowledge lay like a snake in her stomach.

Madi knew it too; she was bouncing up and down with excitement, her face shining.

“You listen to Raven and do everything she says, you understand?”

“I _promise.”_

“You are not Echo. You are not a warrior. You are not staying behind to fight. You are a tour guide. If things go bad, you _run._ Got it?”

“Got it.”

Clarke looked from face to face in the group as they registered what she was doing. “Do _you_ all understand? Don't let her fool you. She talks a big game but she's never shot a gun outside of hunting, and I'd really like to keep it that way.” Nods around the circle.

Then, unbidden, a memory. She was throwing herself at Murphy, because he had been standing by Madi, and she had perceived him as a threat. But he hadn't just been standing _by_ Madi. He had been standing in _front_ of Madi. When Clarke hurled herself at them, before moved to defend himself, John had angled his body so that he was shielding the girl. At the time, she had processed only that he was trying to keep her from Madi, and it had made her fight harder.

But of course, he _was_ trying to keep her from Madi. Because _Clarke_ was the threat, at least according to his reflexes. And his first instinct, before protecting himself, had been to put himself between the threat and her little girl. Without thought. Even when she had cut off his air flow, he didn't budge.

She didn't pretend to understand it, but she wasn't about to question it.

“Change in plan. Madi, you stick with John. Let Raven focus on the repair. Do whatever _he_ says.”

“What?” said Raven, at the same time that John said, “ _W_ _hat?”_

She turned to him. He looked... wary. As though she was laying a trap for him. Well, maybe she was. If anything happened to Madi, she would probably kill him.

“I'm sorry for kicking the crap out of you before.” She decided not to tell him why she was trusting him – it seemed like the kind of thing that might embarrass him.

“I mean, hey, I wouldn't say you kicked the _crap -”_

“John, no gun for you. You just focus on keeping her out of trouble, okay? Protect her like she's your own flesh and blood.” Too late, she realized that was kind of a loaded topic.

But Murphy took it in stride. “Nah. My flesh and blood kinda sucked, to be honest.” He came to stand by Madi, slinging an arm over her, which she irritably shrugged off. “I can do better than that - I'll protect her like she's _your_ flesh and blood.”

****************

Echo had wanted to avoid this. From the moment that Bellamy and Clarke had both gone for the driver's side, with him then awkwardly and politely stepping aside for her, the ride had been tense. She'd thought, if she didn't come, that maybe they could air out whatever it was that was rotting so badly between them that it seemed to contaminate everything. But Clarke had been determined to avoid that.

Bell had gotten into the back, leaving Echo to ride next to Clarke. Wonderful.

Clarke twisted a couple of wires under the dashboard, and grinned at Echo's inquiring look. She had relaxed when Bell climbed into the back, as though it was a relief to be able to pretend that he wasn't there. “We lost the keys sometime around year three. Took us a couple of months to figure out this solution – Mads figured it out, actually. _Really_ missed Raven right around then.”

So, Madi was around in year three. That meant she had to be Nightblood, or she never would have survived the radiation. Echo had suspected as much, but it was good to have it confirmed. She wondered whether she was natural-born or created, the way Clarke had been. She supposed, given what they'd learned about Nightbloods, that it didn't really matter - but in her Azgeda heart, it still did. Commanders were born, not made in a lab.

The Rover began to pick up speed. Echo was surprised to discover that, despite having gotten used to flying through space, she still hated the Rover. It felt wrong to be moving so quickly and so lightly over the earth. Suddenly, she yearned desperately for the feel of a horse's hooves pounding up from the ground.

“How long of a ride is it?”

“About eight hours.”

“Eight _hours?”_ Bellamy spoke up, and Echo wished he hadn't. She had been beginning to relax, wondering if this was what she and Clarke needed – seemingly infinite empty space and hours stretching out before them to let information arise naturally, filling in gaps as they came, so that they could get rid of the horrible feeling that around every conversational turn would be another loaded surprise. Maybe, with enough time, they could just catch up, pretending to be old friends, and go from there. The thought made Echo wistful.

But Bellamy went on, urgency in his voice. He clearly didn't share Echo's wish to catch up slowly. “Clarke, why are you keeping her eight hours from you? What the hell is wrong?”

“I'm not _keeping_ her anywhere. She's.... safe there.”

Bellamy frowned. “Are you saying she's not safe with you?”

“No, I'm not... it's hard to explain. I wanted to wait until you'd seen her. Are you sure you want to hear this? Once I tell you, you're going to worry until you see her.”

“Well, now I'm _really_ worried, so you might as well tell me.”

Clarke sighed. “OK. It starts – well, I guess really, it starts with Praimfaya. After I … got better... I found this place. We're about an hour's drive away from the entrance to the Wonkru bunker, in case you couldn't tell.” Echo noticed that she tactfully left out what “got better” referred to, maybe intuiting that they wouldn't enjoy hearing about the pain their desertion had sentenced her to. “I had my radio, and I had salvaged some supplies from Arkadia – it was surprising what survived, actually; I'm not sure if I would have made it otherwise – and I knew I should settle here, where there was water and game to hunt.

"But I couldn't. I knew that Octavia, and my mom, and Kane and everyone else were so close – just a few hundred feet under the ground – and even though it didn't make any sense, I wanted to be close to them. So every few days, I would come back here, stock up on water and food, and then drive out to the entrance to the bunker and just watch.

“I don't even know what I was watching for. I think I might have gone a little crazy. Sometimes I talked to them, the same way I did... well, I talked to them, but knowing Praimfaya had knocked out their radios, I never tried to broadcast. I just talked to them out loud, just to hear the sound of a human voice. I imagined what they were doing down there, and had conversations with them about it. Bell, I can't tell you how many conversations Octavia and I had in my head about Wonkru, and how she was doing with the command... I told you, I went crazy. A year is a long time to be alone.”

Silence from the back seat. Seeming to remember her audience, Clarke went on, “It wasn't so bad, really. I was lucky to find the resources I did, and I slept a lot. And I could sing as loudly as I wanted, and no one ever made fun of me for it. I sang a  _lot._

“But mostly, like I said, I talked to Octavia and my mom and the others. So when I saw the door open, I thought I had to be imagining it. I _had_ imagined it, so many times before – what it would be like when the five years were up. Who would be first through the door. I always thought about Octavia, that first day on earth, and how she just hopped off the dropship like it was nothing. Remember, Bell, the look on her face? I pictured her having that same look again, even though I knew she was so changed now. I pictured that same joy on her face. That openness.

“Then she did come out. And she didn't look joyful. She looked – frozen. Terrified. It was only the beginning of year two, and the radiation hadn't started to fall yet. I knew she was going to die.”

Bellamy stopped breathing. Echo could feel it from the front seat. She wished Clarke would stop phrasing things so dramatically.

“I told you, Bellamy, she survived. I got her to the – to an old underground bunker. Not as well equipped as the Wonkru bunker, but radiation-proof. Once she was out of the radiation, she recovered quickly. But she had to stay down there, because there was no place safe for her to go. So Madi and I started bringing her supplies every few days - we had to do a lot to decontaminate them at first, but now that it's safe out here, it's just about gathering them and delivering them. Checking up on her, tending to medical stuff if it crops up - which it doesn't, Bell, honestly - and making sure she's OK.”

Clarke was clearly leaving a lot out. She said she had been alone for the first year, and now she was referring to her and Madi bringing Octavia supplies. When had she found Madi? And why was Octavia still in the bunker, when it was safe to come out? Echo could feel Bellamy struggling to choose which question to ask.

“But.... she's OK?” It was a gesture at asking all of the questions at once, and managed to ask none of them effectively.

“She's alive.”

“ _Clarke._ What aren't you telling me?”

Clarke shook her head in frustration. “I'm not trying to be vague on purpose. I wouldn't do that to you, Bell. She's just... hard to describe. She's OK, and she's not OK. She's not the Octavia you left behind. Things got bad in there. Really, really bad. And she took the brunt of it.”

“She's survived hell before.” Bellamy sounded confident, but Echo wasn't so sure. Clarke was trying to brace them for something. There had been a reason she'd wanted Echo along, and it hadn't just been to avoid being alone with Bellamy.

“She barely talks, except to ghosts. When you see her, she might not recognize you. Even if she does, she might attack you.” Clarke was done tiptoeing. _Good._ It wasn't doing anyone any favors.

“That's not possible. She'll recognize me.”

Clarke shrugged. “I hope you're right.”

But Echo was thinking about what Clarke just said. “How do you know what it was like in the bunker?”

“What?”

“You said that it was bad in there, that she'd been through hell. But you also said that she doesn't talk much. So how do you know what happened in there?”

It had just been a hunch – she'd said that Octavia didn't talk much, not that she didn't talk at all. But when Clarke spoke next, it confirmed that Octavia's current state wasn't the only thing they'd been tip-toeing around.

“I know, because Octavia wasn't the only person to be kicked out of the bunker that day.”

****************

Madi was so close Raven could feel her breathing.

“What's that?”

“A fuse. I'm trying to figure out if we could short-circuit the timing system, prevent the shut-down.”

“Oh.” A pause. “What's that?”

Raven sighed. “John?” She called.

“Yeah?” His voice seemed to echo back, even though she was the one who had crawled into the small metal enclosure on the side of the ship, wedging herself in between fuse boxes, wires and control panels - and one very curious, surprisingly flexible girl. When Madi had first asked to come in with her, Raven had told her it was only okay if John said it was, and if she could fit in without getting in Raven's way, confident that Madi wouldn't be able to fulfill both of those requirements. So when John had only been able to stand up to the whining for about five minutes before giving in, and the girl had been able to wedge herself into a spot that Raven would have been willing to bet would have been too small for a cat, she had resigned herself to a certain amount of annoyance - to a point.

“You want to help me out here?”

“You need a tool?” His voice was determinedly neutral.

“No, that's what Emori's for. She's the only one of you with half a brain when it comes to mechanical stuff. I don't want anyone else touching my tools, got it?”

Emori's dry “Thanks” blended with Monty's offended “Hey!” on the other side of the door.

“No offense, Monty. You're just really more of an... engineer.”

“Yeah, I know what that means, coming from you.”

“What does it mean?” Madi's voice was keenly curious.

“ _John._ ”

“Okay, Okay. Madi? Why don't you come on out now?”

“You said I could be in here as long as it's safe!” The whine had returned to Madi's tone.

“No, I said you could be in there as long as it was safe and you shut up. You broke your half of the agreement. Besides, it's too hot in there. Come on out and have some water.”

“Don't worry about me. I don't get dehydrated,” Raven called after Madi's retreating figure. A pause, a slight scuffle as she was lowered to the ground, and then Emori's hand thrust a tin cup of water into the enclosure. Raven took it gratefully.

“Um, how _is_ it going in there?” Monty's voice was tentative. “Optimistically, we have about six hours left.”

“I know, Monty, okay? Don't worry about it. I work best under pressure.” Raven hoped that that was true. She had to admit to herself that in the past few years she had worked _only_ under pressure, not giving her much chance for comparison, and this mess of wires and machinery wasn't making much sense to her. Usually, when she looked inside a machine, it made sense to her the way human features made sense to other people. The shape of the nose might be different, or the placement of the eyes, but it was recognizable - she knew roughly what went where, and what was needed to do which job. Missing pieces jumped out at her the way a missing mouth or ear would to someone else.

But this... it was like looking at one of those paintings that Jasper had gotten so obsessed with in the detritus from Mount Weather, where it looked like someone had taken a face, put it in a blender, and thrown whatever came out on a canvas. Everything was _here,_ she knew, humming away and making occasional beeping noises, quietly doing its job. But nothing was where it was supposed to be. There was no governing plan – it was as though every new repair had been done by a new person, who not only hadn't spoken to the last person to work on it, but who didn't even seem to be working from the same basic set of plans. Like every person for the past hundred years or so – Raven estimated the ship to be at least that old – had rebuilt it from scratch. It didn't make sense. The Ark was that old, but the mechanics and engineers on the Ark had passed on plans, knowledge, principles... how could this ship have been kept running if no knowledge of it was ever passed down from one group of people to the next?

She had a feeling she knew what this was going to come to – her running down the clock, and cutting a random wire or pulling a random fuse, hoping that it would trigger a reset that would go their way, instead of accelerating the death of the people on board.

Sinclair always said that to envision failure was to create failure. “Fine,” she muttered to herself. “You always have the answer, so what do I do now?” Knowing how crazy it would appear to anyone looking in at her right now, she gestured to the tangled rainbow of wires in front of her and paused, trying not to let herself think that she was hoping for a response.

Of course, none came.

****************

The Rover was silent as it flew through the red waste. Bellamy tried to picture it – the little girl, his sister's second, according to Clarke, peering around her at the stranger who had rushed to their aid almost as soon as they had emerged from the bunker. Trying, Clarke said, to be brave in spite of it all. Catching Olivia as she had gone down, weak not only from the radiation poisoning but from the things that had happened in the bunker.

“So that was how you found Madi.”

Clarke paused. “It's funny that you say it that way. I guess so, yeah. I always think of it as her finding me – I guess because I was just there, and all of a sudden she appeared. _They_ appeared. And she was so... herself, right off the bat. Not confident, that's not what I mean. She was terrified. But fierce. And so, so loyal to Octavia. I honestly think she would have killed me – or tried to – if she'd thought I was a threat.”

Once again, Bellamy's understanding of the world was turned on its head. This young girl who seemed determined to haunt him had saved not only Clarke, but his sister as well. He owed her everything. So why was it so hard to feel grateful?

He turned from the window to find Echo watching him from the front seat. He offered her a tight smile. He didn't want her to think that he was upset by the news that Madi and Octavia had emerged from the bunker together, even though... why _was_ he upset by it? One more person he wasn't here for, maybe. One more development he'd had to learn about second-hand.

“Wait, that was – what, four years ago?”

“Almost five.”

“So Madi would have been ...”

“About eight, we think. We're actually not sure – we kind of had to estimate based on what she remembers. She could be as young as 11, or as old as 14.”

“But that's crazy. She was Octavia's second.”

“That _is_ a little young,” Echo spoke up. She had left home to be a second at 12. She knew that other clans did it a bit differently, but she had never heard of an eight-year-old beginning to train.

“I know. Like I said, things went a little crazy in there. They discovered that Madi's a Nightblood, and, well....”

“They thought she could be the next Commander.” Echo understood. In times of crisis, her people had always sought to consolidate power. If they found an Azgeda Nightblood while they were under there, they would have moved quickly to position her to be the next Commander. Even if she was only a child. In spite of herself, Echo felt her heart twist in sympathy for the little girl.

“And Octavia allowed it?” Bellamy sounded doubtful.

“Not... exactly. It wasn't a strategy, Bell. It was a coup. Not everyone was behind Wonkru, and some factions from the old clans began searching for Nightbloods as soon as the doors were closed. When Azgeda found theirs, they... well, they pushed their advantage. Octavia could either take her as a second – and from what Madi says, it sounds like she tried her best to protect her from the harshest aspects of the training – or they would put her on the throne, anyway, and done their best to consolidate power with violence. Octavia did what she thought was best for...”

“For her people,” Echo said softly. Bellamy wondered how she felt about the Azgeda coup – in a different lifetime, she would have been at the head of it.

“So how did it come to both of them being kicked out?” Bellamy returned his gaze the back of Clarke's head. She was keeping her eyes on the dirt track ahead.

“It's a little unclear, honestly. Madi was only eight, remember. But it sounds like – well, they found the Flame.”

“But the Flame was destroyed.” Bellamy spoke confidently, but both Echo and Clarke were shaking their heads.

“No. Octavia pretended that it was destroyed.” Clarke turned to Echo. “You knew?”

“Roan knew. He pretended not to, to keep the peace.”

And what Roan knew, Echo knew. Bellamy had sometimes wondered about that relationship, but had never asked, anymore than Echo had asked for details about his relationship with Clarke. Odd that, without speaking, they had both agreed never to address the truths that they both knew had the power to break them.

“I don't know how it was found, but it was. I don't know what became of the Flamekeeper. I don't know a lot of things. I do know that Octavia's faction and Madi's faction ended up in a race against time, each trying to get the Flame into their Commander before the other side could. It ended....”

“Wait.” Bellamy's mind was reeling. “Octavia's _supporters_ wanted her to take the Flame? But she's not....”

“I know.” Clarke sounded so miserable that, if they had been discussing anything else, he would have reflexively put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “It was my mom, I think.”

“ _What?”_ Neither Bellamy nor Echo had been expecting that.

“I know they gave her a Nightblood transfusion, and I know it didn't take, so it must have been just blood, not marrow. I think my mom may have been trying to do her best to save her – knowing that I was able to take the Flame with just blood – without jeopardizing Madi's safety by harvesting her marrow. I honestly don't know, Bell. But it must have been her, because what I do know – what Madi remembers – is being in a lab with a needle hooked up to her, and Octavia taking the Flame.”

Bellamy tried not to panic. Clarke had taken the Flame. More than that, he had _given_ Clarke the Flame, because she had told him to, and he trusted her. There was no reason that Octavia wouldn't have been able to do the same, if she was hooked up to a Nightblood the way Clarke had been.

 _Except that Clarke is stronger than Octavia._ He hadn't realized how deeply he believed it until just now: that it wasn't the transfusion that had allowed Clarke to survive the Flame, or at least not alone – it had been her own strength. And he had been by her side – he would have pulled it at the first sign of something going wrong.

Octavia had been alone, and Octavia, for all of her warrior fierceness, wasn't strong the way Clarke was. _No one_ was strong the way Clarke was.

The silence had gone on too long. He swallowed. “And?”

“And... she survived. That's all I can really say. I don't know if the way she is now is because of the Flame, or... everything else. But she's alive, and she's still in there somewhere.” Bellamy's heart sank. He would have felt much better if it hadn't sounded like Clarke was trying to convince herself.

He didn't even realize that the story wasn't over until Clarke continued. “After it was clear that Octavia wasn't able to use the Flame the way it's meant to be used, her supporters took her into hiding, along with Madi. But the Azgeda found her, and ….” Now Clarke's voice caught. “This time, they gave Madi the Flame.”

This was obviously deeply upsetting for Clarke, but Bellamy couldn't help but wish that they had just started out doing that, instead of subjecting his poor sister to it first. “So she was able to talk to the Commanders.”

“No. That's the problem. Nothing seems to have happened. The way she puts it, she was just... alone. It a dark room, like a basement, only smaller.”

 _You mean like where my sister lived for most of her life?_ Bellamy tried not to feel bitter at Clarke's obvious concern for the girl who had become her daughter.

“She says she was dark, and cold, and alone in there for a long time. And then – well, they must have realized that it wasn't working, because they removed the Flame.”

“The Commanders didn't choose her,” Echo sounded puzzled. “I didn't know that could happen.”

“By that point, another Nightblood had been found. Both Octavia and Madi were in the way – failed commanders. So they were sent out into the radiation.”

“But they must have known that it wouldn't kill Madi, at least.”

Clarke shook her head. “I don't know if they did. Think about it – who had that knowledge? Us, Octavia, my mom, Kane. Roan. All either dead or, maybe, not talking to the new powers in the bunker. If they didn't trust the factions coming to power, they would have hidden the Nightblood solution rather than risk that any Nightblood in the bunker become a subject of experimentation.”

“So that's why you sabotaged the radiation monitors to keep them down there. To protect Madi and Octavia?” Echo shook her head. “There are innocent people down there who need protecting, too.”

Clarke just shook her own head. Bellamy noticed that she didn't confirm Echo's assumption that this was the reason for the sabotage, but he didn't pursue it. Clarke's eyes found his in the mirror, and to his surprise, hers were full of tears.

“I'm sorry, Bell. I tried to protect her. I really did.”

He nodded and turned away. It was too much. He couldn't cope with not being angry with Clarke right now. It felt like the only thing holding him together.

He remembered holding Octavia in his arms, moments after her birth, promising her that he would never let anything hurt her. Well, he had broken that promise a hundred times over. He wondered if he had ever made a promise that he _hadn't_ broken. Earth wasn't a good place for keeping promises.

He had told Octavia that his life ended the day she was born, and then he had taken it back and told her that his life had begun on the day she was born. What he could never have told her – what he barely understood himself, even now – was that both were true. Any normal life he could have dreamed of leading ended with her first breath. While they lived on the Ark, he had never dreamed of getting married, of having a child. He barely even had friends, knowing that to invite anyone into his life would mean risking discovery. He knew what his future held – keeping Octavia safe, until the day he died. That meant that his life would hold nothing in it except for her – that she would have to be enough.

But that was the other side of the equation, and why he had also been telling her the truth when he said that his life had started with hers. Because she _was_ enough. When he had pictured it – him in the guard, coming home to her at the end of the day, splitting rations, bribing his peers to look the other way when he took more than his fair share, telling her same stories over and over again until one day they lay down and died together, side by side – it didn't fill him with despair. It filled him with peace. He would never be alone, and neither would she. His mother had given him a gift that no one else on the Ark could possibly understand how to value – a sibling. A sister. Family. He had never stopped being grateful for that, not for one moment.

And then, when things changed, and his future blinked and went out in a moment – when she was taken from him, and his mother was floated, and he faced a bleak life, alone, of scrubbing floors and toilets and coming home every day to the same empty little unit, with the bare little space under the floor that he would never open again – he still didn't think about companionship for himself, friends or a girlfriend. He was still, first and only, Octavia's brother. She would be reviewed on her eighteenth birthday, and surely they wouldn't float her for being born. Surely even Jaha wasn't that brutal. And then, when she was released and she could walk in the light, he would make a home for her. The floors and the toilets wouldn't be so bad, because they would be for her.

Until they came to Earth, it had simply never occurred to him that it was possible to love anyone other than her. It frightened him to look back on it now, how ready he had been to sacrifice the entire human race if it meant that he and Octavia would be okay, and together. Sometimes he had nightmares about the moment Raven's radio splashed into the river, how lightly he had turned away from it, already believing himself to be a killer.

But it had been easier, too. Because back then, he _was_ a killer. His devotion to Octavia had turned him into one. It wasn't until Clarke looked at him and he could see himself reflected in her eyes – _you're not a killer, Bellamy_ – that it had occurred to him that there was any other way to be.

And then, things had gotten complicated.

What if he had never _let_ them get complicated? What if he had never allowed Octavia to run off to be with Lincoln, had never let himself begin to care about the other delinquents, never let himself fall for Clarke's stupid, deluded belief in him and his supposed leadership?

He leaned his head back and let himself dream. What if, the moment they had gotten off the ship, he had somehow made Octavia take off with him? Back then, she still listened to him. He could have done it. And he could have taken care of them both – until Praimfaya. Even he couldn't have saved them from that. But at least they would have died together, the way he always thought they would.

A small, nagging voice wondered what would have become of the others without him. When Clarke had insisted he go with her to find Jasper after he had been taken by the Grounders, and she had fallen into that pit, he had been the one to catch her. He imagined her plunging into the pit, without him there to catch her, her body impaled on the spears...

He shook the image out of his head. Finn or Wells would have caught her. She had practically had her own honor guard back in those days. That was the problem – he had adopted Clarke's view of him, believing that he was a great protector, a leader. But what did the evidence say? What actually would have happened to the Hundred if he had taken off that first day?

There would have been a power vacuum at first, but they would have ended up listening to Clarke when it became clear that she was the one who had the skill and intellect to keep them safe. And even after Wells was gone...

Wait. Without Bellamy, Wells wouldn't _be_ gone. It was Bellamy who had given Charlotte the idea to slay her demons, which she had taken literally. Another way in which he was the anti-Clarke. She could find a child in the middle of an irradiated wasteland and keep her safe, cared for, and loved for years. Bellamy only had two days with Charlotte before he turned her into his own twisted reflection - a small killer.

She would never have killed Wells if he hadn't given her the idea. The sudden understanding hit Bellamy like a punch to the gut. He would never have admitted it at the time, but he had admired Wells – for all he hated his father. He admired him even more now, looking back. Every decision he made was for Clarke, but he didn't make a show of it, the way Bellamy did with Octavia. And he didn't make a mess of it, the way Bellamy had with Clarke, and with the original Hundred. He had set out to protect Clarke, and he _had_ protected her. By letting her hate him instead of her mother. By stealing the gun from Bellamy and firing it without hesitation when that panther attacked. By allowing himself to be everyone's bad guy so that it would keep the heat off of her – until finally, it killed him.

If Wells had survived, Clarke would be better off. They would all be better off. Linc would still be alive – and with him by her side, Olivia would have fared better in the bunker. He was sure of it.

No wonder Clarke had wanted to leave. Maybe, after six years apart, she had finally started to think clearly. Maybe she'd realized that her first assessment of him – as a selfish, dangerous criminal – was a lot closer to accurate than the hero that she'd been seeking in him ever since.

****************

Echo was worried about Bellamy's silence, and she didn't want to be worried about Bellamy right now. She had enough to worry about.

Driving through the wreckage of what once had been her home was harder than she'd thought it would be. On the Ring, she had convinced herself that Earth was just someplace she used to live; that home was wherever Bellamy and the Kru were. She had packed up and buried deep inside of herself, the singing cold of spring river water, the wailing creak of ice under an early thaw, the way clouds could pile themselves into mountains in the sky and then, collapsing under their own weight, dissolve into bruising rain that raced across the plains like a migrating herd.

But now that she was back, and not back... the land had been scorched. She had known, those last days, what was going to happen, but somehow she had failed to understand. And when they landed on the one area that seemed to be unsinged, she had allowed herself to believe that maybe she could make a home here, on this new Earth.

Then they had left the green behind, and entered the red. Clarke and Madi had referred to it as the Waste, but Echo couldn't help thinking of it as a corpse. She, like the others, had been haunted by what they had done to Clarke – leaving her alone to burn. Only now did she realize that she had done the same to her home, the Ground that had nurtured, taught, demanded the best of her and her people for as long as any of them could remember. Perhaps she had been right, that day in the lab, when Bellamy found her by her fire. She could have spared herself this – seeing the way the skin had been ripped off her beloved home, leaving behind only this raw red flesh, coursing with heat.

Echo wondered if the Ground could feel. She wondered if it had hurt.

She turned to Clarke and, to her surprise, found that Clarke was already glancing at her.

“We're crossing into old Trikru territory.” Clarke's tone was neutral, but at her words, something in Echo's chest seemed to shift. Clarke, somehow, knew where the old boundaries were. They still existed, even with the surface torn off. Everything wasn't lost. And the place where they'd landed had already started to come back – maybe this desert, scraped raw, could begin to come back too. Or maybe, with its protective covering torn away from it - as Echo's had been when she first stepped on the rocket - it, like her, could become something new. Something worth saving.

So Echo would save it. Whatever it took. If that meant warring with her people – her _old_ people, she reminded herself fiercely – then she would. If it meant forgetting the ways of the ice and learning the ways of the desert, she could do that, too. Clarke, who had watched as the Earth was reborn, could help her.

For the first time, the thought of being dependent on Clarke for something didn't make her heart sink.

“We must be getting close, then. The art supply store, right? That old bunker where you and Finn used to go?” The urgency in Bellamy's voice broke the Echo's meditative spell. “It must be close to the Dropship.”

Echo could tell that Clarke was startled that Bellamy knew about the store, but she was clearly walking on eggshells with him, and wasn't about to ask. Echo wondered how much Clarke and Bellamy kept from each other out of fear of causing pain or anger. _What a stupid waste of time._

“Yeah. We should be there in less than an hour.”

Clarke stepped on the accelerator, as though anxious to make their time together as brief as possible. Echo knew how she felt.

Staring at the Waste blurring by, she thought again of the people in the bunker who wouldn't have a chance to mourn the loss of the trees, to adjust to life in the desert. They couldn't _all_ be a threat to Madi and Octavia. There were children in there. Innocents.

“What's going to happen to them under there?” She had said it more to herself than anything else, but she saw Clarke's shoulders stiffen. Clarke didn't ask who she was talking about.

“I don't know. But it's too dangerous to chance them coming back up here.”

“Because of what they would do to Madi?” Bellamy didn't mention Octavia. Ordinarily, Echo thought, he would have been on board with keeping the human race locked up in order to protect his sister, but now his tone was testy.

He was still angry with Clarke for something. It was worse than when Clarke had been unconscious and he had seemed to forget about the rest of the world. That, Echo could understand. This thick, tangled web of resentment binding Clarke and Bellamy together left her completely in the dark.

“That's part of it.” Clarke sighed. “I wanted to wait until we were with the others again, to show everyone together. It didn't seem fair to... but everything's happening so fast.”

Echo knew that in the old days Clarke would have shown Bellamy first, whatever it was, so that the two of them together could have decided what to do about it. She was getting sick of the lists her brain seemed hellbent on compulsively making – what had changed versus what was the same. It was too much to keep track of.

“Echo, can you open the dash? Yeah, right there. That folded up piece of paper. Read it.”

It was stiff and water-stained, and had clearly been folded and unfolded many times. Noting the sudden tension in Clarke's jaw, Echo was careful not to tear it as she folded it out to its full size.

It was a large, irregularly shaped piece of paper, nothing like the machine-made paper that Echo had gotten used to on the Ark. It was clearly made by hand, from pulp that had been pressed together into a shape that roughly resembled something between an oval and a rectangle. The writing on it was rust colored and...

“Is this blood?”

“I don't know. It looks like it, doesn't it?”

“God.” Echo frowned down at the paper. “But... this doesn't make sense. Who would write this?”

Sensing Bellamy's impatience from the backseat, she passed it back to him as Clarke responded.

“My mother.”

“What?” Bellamy was responding even as his eyes were skimming the page. “How can you tell?”

“It's her writing, Bell. Look at it.”

“I'm not the person to ask. Your mom never wrote me many letters.”

“Yeah, well, it's hers. I'd know it anywhere. You can ask Raven if you don't believe me.”

“Of course I _believe_ you. That's not what I'm saying.”

Echo felt like she was going to scream. She had to cut off the bickering.“But why would Abby write that?”

The note was no more than a few terse sentences, but it was written in three different languages – English, phonetically spelled Trigedasleng, and a series of rudimentary hieroglyphs that Echo had sometimes seen used between clans that didn't share a language.

The message was both completely clear and completely impossible to understand.

 _If you've found this, it means there is life out there. We live underground. We are too dangerous to be allowed to leave. If anything emerges from these doors, kill on sight._ And then, repeated in each language three times, as though it was a prayer:

_Do not let us out._

_Do not let us out._

_Do not let us out._

****************

At first Raven thought she was imagining it. She would shift, or knock against a piece of equipment, resulting in a metallic clang; a few moments later, a faint answering “clang” seemed to come from the other side of the ship wall.

She stilled what had become her increasingly frantic pace, then, deliberately, tapped a wrench against a metal panel. _Clang._

Pause. Then, faintly but unmistakably -

_Clang-clang-clang._

Carefully, making as little noise as possible, she worked her way out from where she had wedged herself. She heard Emori call her name – clearly she wasn't being as quiet as she had hoped – but as her upper body emerged from the panel in the side of the ship and she was hit with fresh air for the first time in several hours, she frantically gestured for the others to keep quiet.

It took her a moment to lower herself down to the ground, and another for her eyes to adjust to the light. When she did, she found that Emori was the only one she'd had to worry about making any noise – the others had retreated to the treeline, but were keeping her covered by training their rifle sights steadily on the ship. It had been a smart move – it gave them a broader line of sight as well as leaving open the option to create a diversion if one was needed.

Gesturing for Emori to follow her and keeping low to the ground, Raven hustled across the 60 feet of clearing, expecting at any moment to hear a shot ring out.

Everything was still as she joined the others. Murphy and the girl were playing some kind of complex game involving pebbles, twigs, and cross hatching lines in the dirt. As Raven approached, she could hear his voice, raised in complaint.

“But my chief made it to your side of the board – doesn't that make him a commander?”

“ _Her._ All the pieces are girls. And no, she only gets made a commander if she either takes out one of my chiefs at the same time, _or_ makes it to my side and then _back_ to your side safe.”

“I'm not going to play with you if you cheat -”

“I'm _not_ cheating, I _never_ -”

“Hey!” Raven hissed at them. The others had maintained their sights on the ship as she'd approached; John and Madi hadn't even looked up from their game. “Guys!”

As she made it to the treeline, Monty and Harper lowered their guns, slowly. John and Madi looked up, startled, but it only took Madi a moment to adjust. She leaped to her feet and ran up to Raven.

“Did you do it?” Her face was flushed with excitement. It gave Raven a pang to think that this kid's faith in her might be a bit disproportionate to her actual abilities.

“Not exactly.” As Madi's face fell, she corrected herself. “Not _yet._ But we might have a problem.”

She filled them in on the noise coming from inside the ship.

“It's like, whoever they are, they're trying to let me know that they're in there. Or trying to communicate with me, somehow. That last time, they kept banging three times, over and over. Sometimes right in a row – _bangbangbang_ – and sometimes more spread out, like _bang-bang-bang._ ”

“Morse code?” Harper spoke up so rarely that Raven had learned to listen when she did.

“What?”

“We learned it when we were training with Kane. Remember?” She nudged Monty. “I feel like that stood for something. Three short, three long... Wait, Raven, was it random, or was it, like, alternating?”

Raven tried to remember. “Alternating, I think.”

“SOS!” Harper looked triumphant. “Three short, three long, three short. SOS. He's trying to signal us.”

“Or it's a trap.” Murphy frowned, the game at his feet forgotten.

“If so, it's not a very good one... it would depend on us knowing Morse code, for one. Which no one but Harper did.”

“You _did_ learn it, you know.” Harper looked up at Monty.

“Yes, but my brain is full of important engineering things.” He smiled back down at her fondly.

Something about their open affection was getting on Raven's nerves. She snapped, “OK, well, it either is or it isn't a trap. Neat. What do we _do_ with that information?”

Murphy shrugged. “We walk into it.”

Emori frowned at him. It was a relief, Raven felt, to be working with open animosity again. “That's stupid. Why would we do that?”

“Because if it's a trap, it means they already know we're here. _That_ means we have two choices – either run away, or don't. And if we don't, we're at their mercy. It's not like they're trapped in there. They have radiation suits. If they were hostile, they could have sent someone out to ambush Raven when they first heard her working out there, but they didn't. To me, that says _not_ hostile. And SOS says that they need our help. So we can either stick around, try to help them, and chance that it's a trap – keeping in mind that we've got guns, it's not like we're totally helpless – or we abandon ship. So to speak.”

It was a long speech for Murphy. “I assume that means you're in favor of sticking around?” Raven glanced around the group. “Easy to say for the guy who promised to hang out at the kiddie table while the rest of us take the actual risks. No -” She held up her hand as Murphy, flushed, opened his mouth to object. “Sorry, I'm just being a bitch. The thought of going up to the front door of a giant prison ship and knocking brings out the worst in me.”

In the end, they didn't have to knock. As soon as they walked up to the door, it began its slow slide open. No one stood on the other side. With a last look back at the trees, where John stood with Madi, his hand firmly planted on her shoulder, Raven walked up the gangway and, followed by Emori, Harper, and Monty with their weapons drawn, entered the gaping ship.

****************

It wasn't until the second culling that Abby gave up on her people.

She thought of it as the second one, but of course, for Wonkru, it was the first. She and Marcus had fought it until the end. They knew what it was to sentence people to death, even if those people were volunteering for it.

In the end, just as with Section 17, they'd had more than enough volunteers. They hadn't needed to set quotas based on clan of origin, as they'd worried they would. Instead, they'd had to turn people away. And this time, unlike with Section 17, the people they'd turned away had been devastated – angry, even. That was how bad things had gotten in the bunker, with one of the farms failing and the oxygen filters operating at 70% capacity for a reason that no one seemed able to understand. People were lining up for a way out, and were furious when it was denied them.

Abby and Marcus hadn't talked about it when they were alone. It was too much just to see it reflected in one another's eyes: the shattering understanding that their culling days weren't over. They didn't have the influence with Niylah that they had with Octavia, and by that time in her regency, the choices she'd had to make had already ripped the soul out of her. When Abby tried to explain to her what a culling does to a leader – to a people – it was as though she was talking to a ghost looking back at her from Niylah's face.

So Wonkru made its sacrifice. Not its first – that was Octavia and Madi, thrust out into the nuclear summer, with nothing but the prayers of the few to protect them – and certainly not its last.

So when the first girl showed up at Medical, too far gone for any rational treatment, Abby hadn't realized she had anything left to fight for.

The girl explained that she'd thought she was safe because she had an implant; so when her periods stopped, and she had put on weight, she had simply ignored what she knew couldn't be true – until the labor pains started.

The second Wonkru charter was clear. No births were permitted in the bunker, excepting by special dispensation by the Regent, or a Commander, should one rise to power. But the charter assumed that any accidental pregnancies would be caught early enough for medical intervention. Abby had never expected to find herself holding a squalling infant, looking down into the equally terrified face of a young mother, and knowing that if she delivered them over to the Council, they would both be executed without a trial. The mother had broken a capital law by carrying the child to term; the child, by existing.

She thought of Octavia, alone under the floor, hidden for so many years. Abby had been on the council that had voted to float Octavia's mother. There had, truly, been no other choice. The prohibition on multiple births was one of the laws that held them back from the brink of anarchy; and yet, as the person who installed the implants in young mothers after they had had their first, who saw the naked grief in their eyes as they realized, viscerally and with their whole bodies, that they would only ever get to experience that wild, raw joy once – she knew that if they relaxed the prohibition even slightly, if they made even one exception, the temptation would be too great, and the population would explode.

She knew the details of Octavia's birth – they were usually the same. The implant failed, and the woman was either in denial, or her body simply didn't give the usual signs – that happened more than people liked to admit. By the time it was undeniable, she couldn't bring herself to let go of the life growing inside of her.

So Abby had looked into the face of the mother who had done no more than what she herself might have done in the same situation, and watched as the air was sucked out of her lungs, as her body snapped like a twig under the force of the suctioning pressure. So many of the floatings on the Ring were like this – someone had found themselves in the wrong circumstances. An unexpected pregnancy, a sick child, a loved one who required, for whatever reason, more than their allotment of resources. So they found themselves breaking the laws that they had sworn to live by, that they knew were required to keep the human race alive, that had seemed quite reasonable until, suddenly, they weren't.

Even before it had happened to Abby's family, she had known that it could. It could happen to any family with the bad luck to experience a moment of greater than usual need or duress. Because the laws weren't about justice, and they weren't about humanity – they were about survival. And for the same reason that it would always be tempting to make exceptions - because the reasons for breaking the law were always so understandable, so _human -_  there could be no exceptions. Ever.

But that was the Ark. The Ground was supposed to be _different._ If it wasn't, what was the point of having escaped the Ark in the first place? They might as well have died up there.This was where they were supposed to be able, not just to survive, but to live. And that meant laws that were right, and just. That meant that an infant could not be murdered simply for existing, that a mother could not be executed for waiting until it was too late to face the inevitable.

She hadn't discussed the choice with Marcus – she had just shown up with the girl and the infant, smuggling them from Medical to the apartment that they were allowed to have to themselves, after the first culling, when there was more room than there were resources.

He had taken one look, and had understood. If there was anyone to whom she would never need to explain her need to move beyond the laws of the Ark, it was Marcus. He was still reeling from the culling, and the way in which he gently steered the girl to a chair, bringing her water and his own dinner rations, was, Abby knew, all that he could do to try to heal from the overwhelming helplessness of having been able, once more, to save no one.

That was how it began. When the second girl showed up, Abby didn't keep her in Medical for long. She knew that Jackson knew and would have been willing to help, but she wasn't willing to endanger him in that way – at least not at first, not until the operation got too big for her and Marcus to be able to manage themselves. The first few they kept home with them, delivering the babies in their apartment, giving the girls cloth to bite on to keep them from crying out in pain, working without medication unless there was a risk of infection, and even then using it sparingly enough that it wouldn't be missed if Medical were inventoried.

By the time there were too many of them to hide in their own apartment, there had been another culling. This time, Marcus and Abby didn't try to stop it. Niylah was listening to no one but the ghosts in her own head by then – the inevitable effect of taking the Flame without Nightblood – and they had decided, without talking about it, to concentrate on the people that they could save.

Sometimes, Abby thought about the note that she had sent out with Octavia, and felt a flash of guilt. What was she saving these children for, if she had only doomed them to be destroyed if and when those doors opened?

But that was only _if_ someone was out there to find the note. And even if they did, she was sure she could smuggle out the children and their mothers without attracting attention; it was only a major exodus that would draw the kind of retribution that she had encouraged in the note.

And that was what, somewhat guiltily, she still believed to be right. She didn't know what would happen when Wonkru gained access once more to the Ground, but she couldn't imagine that the warring factions that were barely holding it together for the sake of survival underground would keep the peace long if they escaped. And if they were this vicious at nominal peace, she didn't want to know what they would be able to do when at open war.

Niylah fell, and Roah, the cousin of Roan, took over. He didn't last long – murdered in his quarters by his lover, Daia. Daia ruled for over three brutal years, during which time Abby stopped second-guessing her decision to send the note. There was no hope among the ambition-diseased leadership. There was no hope among the squabbling clan members, frightened and reverting to the animosity they had known before Lexa had briefly managed to stitch them together around a common goal. There was no hope among the few, shell-shocked, frightened civilians who truly did think of themselves as Wonkru, who were just trying to make it through the day or waiting until the next culling gave them their chance of escape.

Despite her best efforts, they were back on the Ark, staking all of their hopes on a few kids. She couldn't save everyone, and she couldn't convince the leaders to make better choices – but she could look out for the children. And when the time came, no matter how dangerous it was up there, she could do whatever it took to send them, once more, to the Ground.

****************

It was well under an hour later that Clarke stopped the Rover. Bellamy looked around, confused. It didn't look like the right spot for the art supply store, but then, it had been Finn's place, not his. He barely knew where it was. Besides, everything looked different now.

But Clarke confirmed his suspicion when she held up her hand to indicate he should stay put. “This will only take a few minutes. I need to grab a few things for her.”

He frowned. “Isn't the water and food already packed?”

“That's not all I bring.” She closed the door behind her and, again, gestured for them to stay. “Honestly, it'll be faster if I go by myself.”

He rode out the old impulse to insist on having her back, though it made his hands clench. She had navigated this landscape without him for six years; she didn't need him now. She was sending that message loud and clear.

Still, he couldn't take his eyes off of her as she jogged away from the Rover to what looked like a sheer drop-off, and disappeared over it. He was so focused on _not_ going after her that he barely noticed when Echo turned to him.

“So, how long until you forgive her?”

“What?” He frowned absently, his eyes still in the direction in which she had disappeared.

“For whatever it was that happened between you two in here. Or whatever it is that's happening between you in your own head. How long?”

The words finally cut through his preoccupation, and he turned his frown in her direction. “What are you talking about?”

“You've been miserable ever since your conversation with Clarke about the vote. What the hell happened between the two of you?”

He sighed heavily. He had wanted Echo and Clarke to get along. But he also wasn't going to lie to Echo to protect her. “She threatened to leave us. To help us get on our feet and then split.”

Echo was nothing if not loyal. He was startled when her only response to this was a cool, “So?”

“What do you mean, _so_? So she was ready to abandon us – all of us!”

“To leave us. The way we left her. I can't say I blame her.”

“That's not fair. We _had_ to leave her. It's not the same thing.”

“You're right, it's not. We left her here to die. She was going to make sure that we were – what did you call it? _On our feet_ , first.”

Bellamy usually loved the delicate way Echo found her way around the words of old colloquialisms, making them sound new and strange. But he wasn't in the mood to be charmed. “Are you fucking kidding me? You know that if we'd had a choice, nothing would have kept us from taking her with us. And she was ready to just throw us away – to act like we were nothing to her. Maybe we _are_ nothing to her.”

“She doesn't act like you're nothing to her. She acts like she's thinking about you in everything she does. She acts like she's terrified of hurting you.”

Bellamy was startled. That wasn't what he saw. He saw a Clarke who was distant and cool, taking every opportunity to show all of the ways in which she no longer needed him. “Where are you getting that?”

Echo shrugged and turned away. “If you want to be blind, I can't teach you how to see.”

He knew that he should say something to reassure her, but couldn't imagine what to say. He didn't even understand how he knew that she needed reassurance, only that it felt as though they were teetering over an abyss, and only he had the power to keep them from going over.

He sat in silence as she turned away from him and looked out at the place that used to be her home.

****************

Octavia was thirsty, but she kept working. She had tried to capture these two figures – Antigone hunched over the body of her lost brother, Polyneices, using the cover of night to give him the burial that the civil powers had denied him – over and over again. Polyneices looked too frail and cold, Antigone too blank. No matter how many times she tried, she couldn't capture the crushing grief that the tableau needed.

_This one, again?_

It's important.

_Why?_

I don't know.

_Why don't you look behind your doors? The answer must be in there somewhere._

Octavia tried to ignore the panic that welled up at the thought. She concentrated on the tiny face in front of her. How had Polyneices died? Battling his brother in a civil war. That would show on his face. She used her finest tool, tried to etch pain on the brow, but it only made him look old.

“He's not old.” She spoke it out loud without realizing it.

 _How do you know?_ Linc sounded genuinely curious. She wondered if he knew what was behind the doors. After all, ghosts could walk through walls. Couldn't they?

“I don't know how I know. I just do.”

_Well, you'd better finish quickly. If they don't show up with the water soon, this is going to be your last attempt._

Just as well. It's improper to keep a living thing buried under the ground.

Where had she learned that? The wording was as familiar to her as her own voice. But it didn't sound like it should be spoken in her voice... it should be lower, more gruff. The thought of it sent shivers up her spine. Why? What was so frightening about that thought?

“I'm living. I'm a living thing,” she said out loud.

_Not for long._

“I'm a living thing.” She whispered it to herself, as though if she were careful, she could keep this secret to herself.

****************

“Bellamy, when she held a gun on you and threatened to kill you if you opened the bunker, how long did it take you to forgive her?” Echo had decided to try again, though she didn't know why she was fighting so hard for Clarke and Bellamy's friendship.

 _I'm fighting for him. Because without Clarke, he's lost._ As usual, her mind was full of thoughts that she would rather not examine too closely.

“I don't remember,” he muttered.

“I'm guessing... maybe an hour. When you threw the radio into the river, how long did it take for her to forgive you?”

“You weren't there for any of these things.”

“You live with six people for six years, their stories become your stories. How long?”

“I don't know. Less than a day.”

“And how long did it take for her to forgive you for leaving her alone on a dying planet?”

A long pause. Echo wondered if she was pushing her luck. The habit of not discussing Clarke was as old as their relationship – she was in uncharted territory.

“What's your point, Echo?”

“My point is, the two of you have been forgiving each other the unforgivable for almost as long as you've known each other. And suddenly, after six years apart, wishing for nothing more than the slightest hint that she might be alive, you find yourself unable to get over a minor squabble.”

“It wasn't -”

“It wasn't minor? Compared to her holding you at gunpoint?”

Again, a long pause. She was an Azgeda warrior, she reminded herself. She didn't shy away from danger. “The one thing you _haven't_ been able to forgive has been her threatening to leave. Have you thought about why that might be?”

She had. She had been thinking about it non-stop. She wondered if it had to do with the feelings that might take the place of the anger, if he allowed them to.

“I just can't believe she would threaten to leave us.” It was the last gasp of his rage as it left him.

“Us? Or you?”

Now, he looked honestly confused. “I don't understand the difference.”

That was the problem. He  _didn't_ understand the difference, and as long as he didn't, it would be impossible for them to have this conversation. She sighed heavily, as Clarke's head seemed to appear from nowhere at the top of the ravine. She pulled herself back level with them and began approaching, a misshapen shaped sack slung over her shoulder.

“I'll explain it to you sometime,” she said, just as Clarke opened the back of the Rover and slung the sack in. “What is that?”

“Scrap metal.” Before Bellamy could ask, she said, “you'll see. Honestly, Bell, it's easier to show you than explain it. We'll be there soon.” But her voice was lighter than it had been – maybe in response to the way his shoulders no longer hunched up around his ears at the sight of her.

 _You're welcome,_ thought Echo. But there was no bitterness in the thought. It wasn't just that Bellamy and Clarke needed each other – it was that the rest of the Kru needed them to be okay.

In space they might have been able to structure their family around Clarke's absence, but they were on the Ground now. And whatever family they ended up with down here, Clarke and Bellamy were going to be at the heart of it. It had been that way from the beginning, no matter how they had fought it. Whether that left any space for Echo had yet to be seen – but if being on the Ground meant fighting tooth and nail for the survival of her clan, so be it. Even if this kind of fighting never involved touching a sword; even if it meant losing everything she had felt so lucky to find over the past six years; even if it ended up breaking her heart.

 ****************

It was nearing dark when they pulled up by the bunker. With its green camouflage seared away, the door sat in the middle of a sandy expanse like a wounded animal, vulnerable to attack.

"You're sure she's safe here?" Bellamy couldn't get used to the idea that they were alone, that the only threat left was the land itself.

"She's been down there for more than four years. No one's bothered her so far." 

"You keep it locked?" Bellamy scanned the horizon. Nothing but rocks to break the endless red expanse. 

"Bell, no. I would never lock her in. She locks her _self_ in." Clarke sounded startled by the question, and sad. His own heart broke at the idea of it - the girl who  had longed to escape her hiding place under the floor for so long, burying herself alive. 

"Maybe she'll come back with us today." Clarke's hand on his arm, hesitant, as though unsure if he would want her comfort.  _Please don't go. I need you._ The space on his arm cold when she let her hand drop. It was only then that he realized why she had insisted that Echo come along - because she thought that he would need comfort, and that Echo was the only one who could provide it. As though Clarke wouldn't have been enough for him. As though she wasn't the  _only_ person he could imagine wanting after they found... whatever it was they were going to find down there. 

She knelt by the door and tested the handle, but it didn't move. She frowned. "She doesn't always lock it. Maybe she's having dreams again. Or one of her ghosts is telling her to." She knocked, a slow, rhythmic knock. Four times, then a pause, then two more. 

An echoing knock in response. Two times, then a pause, then two. 

Then Clarke again. The same knock - Four times, then a pause, then two more. 

Then a long pause. Clarke frowned again. Finally, the handle below them shifted and clicked as the bolt on the other side slid out. Clarke sighed with relief, and it was only then that Bellamy realized how worried she had been. She pulled the door open - nothing below them but darkness. Bellamy thought he saw a pale shape moving just on the periphery of sight.

"Let me go first. I need to warn her..." But he was already lowering himself through the doorway, using the strength in his arms to drop down, skipping the formality of the ladder, Clarke's voice fading above him. His feet hit the packed earth softly, and he heard the clatter above him as Clarke followed him down, clumsy in her haste.

She was there. It was Octavia. His brain repeated the fact to him, over and over again, because something in him couldn't believe it. 

She had always been small, but she had never looked frail before. But now - she looked as though she would collapse at the slightest pressure. Her eyes were huge in her hollow face. Her hair, long and lank, hung on either side of her face. If Clarke hadn't warned him, he would have thought that he was seeing a ghost.

Then she came toward him, arms out as if to hug him, and he was overwhelmed with relief. Despite his avowed confidence, Clarke's warnings had scared him, and part of him had been afraid that, after everything she had been through, she might  _not_ remember him at first.

He opened his arms to catch her and hold her, knowing that whatever had happened to make her look so absent, so  _blank,_ they would figure it out together, as they always had. 

When she spoke, her voice was a hoarse, hollow whisper, her words strange. "It's improper to keep a living body beneath the earth." 

Too late, he saw the flash of metal in her hand, and tried to step back. The blade caught him in his side, between his ribs, and he couldn't help but think of Finn as he fell. Was this where Clarke had stabbed him, to end it quickly? He looked for Clarke, now, wanting her face to be the last thing he saw. Not this demon wearing his sister's face, speaking with his sister's voice. 

He couldn't find her. Octavia was lost, and he was leaving Clarke, again. As his vision faded to black, he clung to the only comfort he could find - the knowledge that in death, he could never fail her again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny baby chapter! xo

She had tried too hard to get the figure right, poured too much of herself into it, and now he was standing before her, another ghost. Risen from the grave, unmoored by funereal rites.

Polynices. 

The tool that she used to etch pain on the faces of her people was still in her hand. He had walked into her tomb, where she had been waiting for him for... it felt like a lifetime. 

He was no living thing. No living thing should be kept under the ground. 

It was over in a moment, and he was on the floor. She hadn’t realized that this was what she had been waiting for - for him to be entombed beside her - until he fell, and she realized that at last she could rest. 

She wanted to sprinkle dust on him, like in the story. That was how it was supposed to go. But as she knelt to gather it, strong hands pulled her away from him, a harsh voice calling her by the wrong name. 

“Octavia! No! That’s Bellamy!”

She knew the voice. It was one of the beloved ghosts, the ones who brought her food and water. Too late this time. She had died with Polynices.

“My name is Antigone,” she whispered. “Let me bury my brother.”

Another voice, more of a snarl. “Your name is Octavia, and your brother isn’t dead.”

Not possible. Polynices dies. She had begged the voice in the dark, over and over, for it to go a different way, but he said that stories only go one way. Antigone dies. Lincoln....Haemon dies. Polynices dies.

Bellamy dies.

Bellamy dies.

Except – Bellamy _doesn’t_ die. Bellamy lives in the stars.

She fumbled at the hands grasping her. “Clarke, let me go!”

_Who is Clarke?_

“No - Echo - I won’t hurt him. Is he okay?”

“Of course not! You stabbed him, you psycho!”

The voice bristled with swords. _Who is Echo?_ Octavia recalled a long fall, rushing water.

Antigone’s brother was dead, and nothing could be done, because stories only go one way. But Octavia’s brother....

_Open the door, Octavia._

I can't.

_You have to._

Will you still be there if I do?

_I don’t know. But he won't be, if you don't._

The trouble was, she couldn’t open one door without opening them all. And she had to open them, because he was somewhere on the other side.

They flew open, the ghosts screeching like banshees. The little girl with black blood. Abby and Marcus, begging for someone to be spared... for _her_ to be spared. The opening door, the searing light. Clarke catching her as she fell. Clarke, and more black blood. So much blood.

The ghosts didn’t stop there. They went all the way back. Jasper... oh god, Jasper. Lexa, Indra, everyone to whom Octavia ever swore loyalty. Was her loyalty poison?

Adam. Fitting that he should be the first ghost.

And standing behind them all, the last one to step out - not a ghost, but a little boy. Small, freckled, and fierce. A voice in the dark.

_Bellamy._

She collapsed beside him.  _Living things,_ she prayed. Let them both be living things.

****************

Bellamy was back on the Ark, on the viewing deck, alone.

_Of course._  The past few days had been nothing but an especially vivid dream. She was gone, seared away with the Earth itself. Octavia, safe, was buried like a seed awaiting a new season.

He leaned his head back against the wall, noticing the sharp pain in left ribcage as he moved. He felt tired all of a sudden, and empty. He wondered where the others were. It wasn't often that he was alone these days. He tried not to let himself be alone anymore, not since coming back without her. Without...

His thoughts were fading fast. Without … he had been thinking of her just a moment ago. She was there, on the dead planet that drifted in front of him. On the Ground. She needed him.

Octavia? No, that wasn't it. He went to the Ground for her. He wouldn't have come back without her. Would he?

Something else was wrong. This was the viewing deck on Alpha station, and Alpha station was gone now. Why was he here?

He sighed, and closed his eyes. It had been such a terrible dream, all of it. He just needed to rest his eyes for a moment, and then he would go back and tell Octavia a story before bed.

It was so _quiet._ Not just around him – and that was strange, too, there were usually people milling around on the viewing deck – but inside his own head. There was a voice, missing.

The space under his left ribcage twinged again, but the pain was growing fainter.

Octavia would be missing him. He would go to her, soon.

“She's not there.”

He turned to his side. He wasn't alone, then. A girl – Octavia? No. Octavia couldn't be out on the deck like this. Someone could see her. Who was this girl? Octavia had never frowned up at him in that way – so grave. As though she knew more than he did.

“What are you doing here?” He had intended to ask who she was, but the question was lost on his tongue. He had a feeling he was supposed to know. He had a feeling that there was a lot that he was supposed to know.

“I don't know, you're the one who brought us here.” She frowned, looking around. “It looks different. This isn't the Ring.”

“Go-Sci? No. Why would it be? I only go there when my unit...” When his unit had duty there. But he didn't have a unit, anymore. Why not?

“What's wrong with you?” She poked him in the side, and he gasped in pain. She frowned again, seeming to begin to understand something. “...Huh.” She poked again.

“Hey, do you mind? That hurts.”

Suddenly, she looked worried. “Let's go for a walk. You can show me where you live.”

“Nah, I'm tired. Let's sit for a bit.”

She got to her feet, grabbed his hand, and pulled, sending a searing bolt of pain through his side. It woke him up. “ _Hey.”_

“ _Get. Up.”_ Her voice was tinged with desperation now, but had a familiar air of command that he instinctively followed.

“Ow. Fine.” He got to his feet. She didn't drop his hand, or look away from him with those big, worried eyes. “Hey. Everything's going to be OK.” But was it? He was only now registering how odd all of this was. He needed to find Octavia, and make sure that she was OK. “Let's go to my... our... my mom's...”

But nothing that he said seemed right. He paused, dizzy, and put a hand on the wall.

“She needs you. You have to come back.” The girl's voice hadn't lost its desperate edge.

“Who? Come back where? I never left.”

“What are you talking about? Where _are_ we? What is all this?” She sounded younger, and more afraid, with each question.

It hurt, but he knelt beside her, placing his hands on her upper arms and turning her to face him. “Hey. It's going to be OK. Do you want...” What worked with Octavia when she was like this? “Do you want me to tell you a story?”

A shadow of relief passed over the girl's face. “Yes. Tell me about Orpheus and Eurydice.”

“Who?”

The girl looked panicky. “Orpheus and Eurydice!”

“I don't know them. Do they live on Alpha Station?”

“What? No!” She pulled away from him, again grabbing his left hand. “We need to get to the launch.”

“What are you talking about? They're not going to allow a little girl and a janitor...” _Why did I say that? I'm a guard. Aren't I?_ “... they're not going to allow us near the launch pad. I don't even have clearance to enter Go-Sci.”

But the little girl was already walking. “Look, I'll tell _you_ the story, OK? Eurydice loved Orpheus.”

“She did?” He began to hurry after her. He should have been able to catch up with her, no problem, but for some reason his legs didn't seem to be working very well.

“Yes. She did.” She wasn't looking back at him. “But she lived in the Underworld, and he lived among the stars. He tried to bring her with him back up to the stars, but he couldn't.” She shook her head, angrily. “But he couldn't leave her alone in the Underworld, either.”

“OK.... um, kid?”

“Yeah?”

“What's your name? Do you have parents around here somewhere? Should they know where you are?” Bellamy knew that he was asking all the wrong questions, but he couldn't remember what the right ones were.

“Just listen to the story.” She still didn't look back. “So every day, he just kind of … haunted the Underworld with her. Like, she couldn't be dead, because he just thought about her all the time, and every time he thought about her it was like he was calling her. But she couldn't be alive, either, because he was in the stars without her. So all she could do was think about him up there.”

They had left Alpha station behind. The door to Go-Sci whooshed open with a quiet hum, and Bellamy paused, expecting a guard to appear to check their clearance. But no one came. “Where the hell is everyone?”

The girl ignored him, still looking straight ahead, still moving at what seemed to him to be an impossible speed. “And he wasn't any better. He was like, kind of … half dead. Because a half of him stayed down in the Underworld with her, frozen. Knowing that he should have been able to bring her back with him. But half of him was convinced that if he didn't live on for both of them, she would be dead for real. So every day was like torture for him, only he couldn't let himself think that, because he had to live for her sake, and that wouldn't be living. He was like a ghost in his own life.”

He didn't want to hear anymore. They arrived at the cockpit, and the girl stood for a moment before the viewfinder, staring out at the planet floating in front of them. The planet had a name, he knew. He had been thinking about it just a moment ago.

“They went on like that for a long time, until a miracle happened.”

He turned to her, but she turned away, pressing the release for the door that he knew wouldn't open. It was to the launch pad. No one was allowed in there but the chief engineer, the ship's captain, and Jaha. _Jaha._ Bellamy was relieved to have remembered a name. They seemed to be escaping him at the moment. For some reason, the animosity that usually sparked at the chancellor's name was absent, swallowed in the overwhelming emptiness that he carried within him.

The doors whooshed open. _Not possible._

Before him stood a rocket. Not like the model rockets they made in aeronautics class; not like the demonstration rocket that he had gone to see with his mother when he was 12, and tried to recreate for Octavia when he got home. This one looked _used._ Beat up, and maybe not up for flight. It looked somehow more real than anything he'd ever seen before.

And there was writing on the side. What did it say? It was scrawled on with spray paint, and his eyesight was growing fainter. He was pretty sure he could see a _P_....

“A miracle happened. They found each other again. He made it to the Underworld, or she made it to the stars. It doesn't really matter. But he was so afraid that he couldn't even look at her. They had both changed, and that reminded him of all of the time they had lost. And everything in the underworld – and in the stars – was dangerous, so all he could think about was losing her again, so much so that he couldn't even stand to be with her. So he acted like a jerk and made her sad and....”

The girl's voice was fading. It didn't seem important. She wouldn't even look at him.

The writing was what was important. _r....i...nc...e...._

“ _Princess,”_ he whispered.

The images, when they came, were like a wave of fire in his brain. Octavia, coming at him with a grasp of death. Clarke, so near, but with no time to say the things he needed to say. Echo's hands, fumbling, grasping at the life that pooled around him.

They kept going, faster, farther back, mixing together. Octavia in his arms, wailing, then quiet, content, because he had made her safe. The deep warmth of that. His mother as they dragged her out of the room, screaming at him to protect her, always.

His Kru. Murphy – so afraid, he could see clearly now. Afraid, all the time. And Emori, brave enough to wish for more than fear. Harper, who suffered so much more than she let on. Monty, determined to save them all, the way he couldn't save Jasper.

And Echo. She had been there when he needed someone to be there, when he'd been so desperate to live - she had been life. He realized now, with a pang far deeper than the pain in his ribs, that that wasn't enough.

The images were resolving now, slowing and coming into focus.

Clarke, telling him that he wasn't a killer– allowing himself to believe it, if only for a moment; to believe himself to be the kind of man she could believe in.

Clarke, giving him the forgiveness that she couldn't bear to give herself.

Clarke, aiming a gun, thrilling to the power of it. Playing a drinking game because he was there to watch and make sure that she was safe. Closing the dropship doors; making sure they were _all_ safe, even when it tore the heart out of her. Always.

Putting his name on a list after he had lost the right to be saved. Saving him, again and again. Saving him in spite of himself. 

Falling in love. Losing; breaking. Growing whole. Breaking, again - this heart that walked in the world, _his_ heart, so vulnerable outside of his chest. As he stood by and saw it all, and could do nothing.

“She needs you.” The voice from behind him continued to fade, but he didn't look back.

_Princess._ He whispered it, reverently. “I'm coming home.”

 

  
  


 


	6. Chapter 6

The man looked small inside his radiation suit, like a boy wearing his father's clothes. He scanned their faces with hollow eyes.

“Where's Clarke?”

Raven hadn't realized they'd gotten to the introductory stage when Clarke was on board before. “She's out there -” gesturing at the world outside the ship's door - “covering us." A little white lie. No need for this man to know that they were on their own. "Why did you signal us?”

He shrugged. “I could hear you breaking in. I didn't think I had anything to lose. If you compromised the structural integrity of the hull, the radiation would contaminate everything, and we'd all be goners. I don't know how you all manage to be out there without suits, but it would kill _us_ instantly.”

“We know. That's why were were working back there – _not_ breaking in. And I wouldn't have compromised the hull.” Raven wondered why she was getting defensive. It really didn't matter what this lug thought of her work.... but she couldn't quite bring herself to let it go, either. “I was staying well away from the wall of the hull. I wouldn't have punctured it even if -”

“Yeah, but all it takes is one slip, and -”

“I don't _slip_ , OK?” Raven could feel her blood pressure rising.

“Hey.” Raven hated when Monty used his soothing tone, but it did give her someone new to be annoyed at. “Oxygen, remember? Let's keep our eye on the prize.”

Raven took a deep breath. “We're here to rescue you.”

“By hammering at my hull and then tracking radiation all over my ship?” He sighed. “Did Clarke tell you? About the O2 and the life-support reset?”

“That's why we're here.”

He frowned. “But – why? You don't know us. Why are you trying to save us?”

“Do you want us to answer that question, or do you want us to get to work actually saving you?”

He paused, seeming to be actually weighing the options. Finally, heaving another heavy sigh and stepping aside, he gestured at the control bay behind him. “You're a little late. I already hacked into the system and reset the O2. But the life support... is a little more complicated. Hence the SOS.”

“Complicated, how?” Raven was already sitting down at the terminal. “And how did you get in?”

There was a long pause, until she looked up at him. To her surprise, he looked abashed. “OK, so maybe 'hacked' was an exaggeration. The last guy in charge had his password taped on a Post-It note underneath the central command dash.”

“What the hell's a Post-It note?” Emori spoke up from behind him.

“It doesn't matter.” Emori always wanted to know everything about everything. It was a quality with which Raven could usually sympathize, but they were on borrowed time. “What's wrong with the life support? Why didn't it reset when the oxygen did?”

He shrugged, uncomfortably. “I don't know. It should have. Something went wrong. An alarm was going off for a little while, but.... it stopped.”

Raven scanned the command center in front of her. Six central screens with rotating views – it looked like they were monitoring both the health stats of the people on board and the operations of the ship. There may have been some other information flashing by, too, but she couldn't process it quickly enough. At times like this, she really missed Becca.

“Are you going to be able to do it? If not, we need to start waking people up. Like, now.” The man's voice had an edge of dread to it.

“Should we start doing that anyway? Just in case?”

“No.” The tone was curt. “It should be a last resort.”

That was an interesting reaction. Raven made a mental note to learn more about it later.

For now, she tried to concentrate on the rotating displays in front of her. Who had designed it to display this way? It was stupid. There had to be a way to slow it down. Only one of the monitors was connected to a keyboard, but if she could figure out how to access the data she needed without waiting for it to scan by again....

“So? Can you do it?” The man had a testy edge to his voice. She wished he would shut up and let her think. All of the information that Becca had dumped in her brain was in there somewhere – she needed some peace and quiet in order to access it.

That was when the alarms started going off.

****************

The Waste flew by. Echo knew that if she hit a bump in the track the wrong way at this speed, they were all dead. But since Bellamy might be dead if she slowed down, she really didn't care.

“How's it going back there?” She was going too fast to take her eyes of the landscape in front of her. She'd had a 10 second driving lesson from Clarke, and wasn't feeling so confident that she thought she should look back to check – but it was hard, knowing that Bell was potentially bleeding out a meter away from her, and that his maybe-murderer was still crouched by his side like a bird of prey.

“He's still not clotting. Can you go any faster?” Clarke had used all of the herbal coagulants in the medical kit that she kept stocked in the Rover. Nothing was working.

“No. I tried. Something up in the front there started making a funny noise.”

“You mean the engine?”

“I don't know. Does the engine kind of moan like a dying boar?”

“It's really not supposed to, no. OK, Echo, just focus on driving, OK? I promise that I'll keep him alive.” _If he can be kept alive._ The other half of the promise didn't need to be spoken. Both women had lived on this planet long enough to know that every promise came with strings attached.

“Clarke? Is he going to be OK?” The voice was quiet and tentative, but bore no resemblance to the hollow, haunted monotone that had emerged from Octavia just before she stabbed Bellamy. Echo had wanted to leave her behind, but she started to scream when they tried to separate her from him, and Clarke said that she hadn't seen Octavia this animated since she'd emerged from the bunker – that _this_ Octavia could be trusted to not hurt Bellamy further. Echo was glad, for Bell's sake, that Octavia was better – she just wished that she hadn't had to stab her brother to get whatever it was out of her system. Though she had to admit, if Bellamy had thought that dying would help bring Octavia back to her senses, he would probably have volunteered.

It wasn't actually that bad of a wound – or it shouldn't have been. Between the fourth and fifth rib on the left side, Clarke had said – the same place, Echo knew, that she had stabbed Finn to steal him away from the Trikru's torture, but not nearly as deep. But either it had nicked something important, or it was just Bellamy's usual tendency to bleed more than Echo thought was strictly necessary, because the blood was gushing from the wound. Octavia had also pulled the knife out before anyone could stop her, so she may have done even more damage. His face had gone bone-white almost immediately, and the blood was showing no signs of stopping, no matter what Clarke did.

They were never going to make it in time.

Octavia must have had the same realization, because her voice, firmer now, emerged again from behind Echo. “Clarke, you have to transfuse him. Give him my blood. It doesn't matter what happens to me.”

Only then did Clarke show the slightest hint that she bore Octavia any ill will for stabbing him. “That's a sweet thought, Octavia, but it's too little, too late.” Echo imagined that even the mild sharpness of her tone must have shown on the other girl's face like a slap, because almost immediately, she softened her voice. “I know you would give him all your blood, if you could. But we don't have any way of typing you – or you, Echo.” She raised her tone before Echo could open her mouth to suggest what Clarke must have known she was going to say. “If his body rejects the blood, he'll be in even worse shape than he is now. It's too dangerous. For _him,_ ” she clarified, clearly understanding that both Octavia and Echo would gladly have risked their lives. Echo wondered if Clarke felt the same, knowing how Madi depended on her.

She got her answer soon enough.

“What about you?” Octavia's voice was soft, tentative. “What about... what you did for me?”

There was a long pause. “That was when there was no other choice. It didn't matter if your body rejected it, because you were going to die either way.”

“But I didn't reject it. And I'm related to him. Doesn't that mean...”

“It doesn't mean you're necessarily the same blood type. But...” Clarke's voice had turned thoughtful and quiet enough that Echo had to strain to hear. “We've never seen anyone reject Nightblood. It might be some kind of universal donor type.”

Without asking, Echo turned the wheel, spinning the vehicle more sharply than intended. She slammed on the brakes, not anticipating the effect that it would have. The squealing noise came again, but this time from underneath the Rover, and she felt her own weight fly forward as there was a clattering noise from the back.

“ _Jesus,_ ” Clarke yelled from the back. “What the _fuck,_ Echo?”

“Do it. He's going to die.” Echo's voice was shaking. She had never come this close to losing him before. How had he and Clarke done it – watching one another walk into death over and over again without going insane? She couldn't bear this. She turned to look Clarke in the eyes, wondering what was happening behind the gritted jaw and flushed cheeks. “ _Do it.”_

There was what felt like an interminable pause, but it only could have lasted a few seconds. Clarke looked down at Bellamy, who lay, if possible, even more still than before. Was he even still breathing?

Echo didn't know what calculations took place in her mind in that one, long moment. But at the end of it, she rolled up her sleeves and turned to Octavia. “Get the med kit. Echo, start a fire.”

Echo didn't ask for details, but hopped out of the Rover. _This_ was something she could do. She had a small fire going in less than a minute. Clarke jumped out beside her and handed her two vicious looking needles, each with a hollow carved out of the center.

“Jesus, Clarke.”

“I know. It's not pretty, but it's all we've got. Hold them in the flame for as long as you can without warping the metal.” Clarke turned her attention to her own arms, checking them against each other and pulling the sleeve on one up higher than other, knotting it tightly so that the veins appeared to bulge. Echo noticed that in the crook of her arm, right over where the veins gathered, was a small, crescent shaped scar.

“Clarke, he's ready,” Octavia called from the rear of the Rover. Echo thought about chastising Clarke for leaving him alone with her, but decided it wasn't a wise time to alienate the woman on whose blood Bellamy's life depended.

Echo didn't know why Clarke kept a length of narrow, clear plastic tubing the med kit, and she didn't ask. Maybe this wasn't the first time she'd had to transfuse blood on the fly – Echo thought about the scar on Clarke's arm and the comment that Octavia had made about what Clarke had done for her. She suspected there was more to the story of how Octavia made it to the store than Clarke had let on.

By the time the tube was connected to the needles on both ends, Bellamy's breathing was imperceptible.

“OK, there's a possibility I might pass out. Whatever happens, do _not_ remove the needles from either of our arms until he's out of the woods, understood?”

Echo didn't ask about what to do if one of them died during the transfusion. It seemed like the obvious exception to Clarke's instruction.

“And make sure you keep pressure on his wound. There's no point in doing this if the blood just keeps coming out the other side.”

“Got it.” Octavia was pressing the cloth against his wound so hard her knuckles whitened.

Now that the time had come, Echo found herself oddly hesitant to see Clarke plunge the needle into her arm. The last thing the Kru needed was to lose _both_ of them.

Clarke seemed to have been struck by a similar thought. She took a deep breath, seemed to steady herself, and exhaled a string of quiet curses. "Shit shit shit. OK. Echo – if I don't make it.”

“Clarke, you -”

“No, Echo, we have _no time._ Listen to me. If I don't make it. Madi is Azgeda, you know that, right? I've taught her everything I know, but it's not enough. She's going to need you. All of you, but _especially_ you. OK? Promise me.”

This wasn't fair. Just because Clarke had decided to adopt a daughter didn't make her Echo's responsibility. No part of Echo had ever wanted children.

She looked at the needle hovering over Clarke's vein. “I promise.” Screw it. Bellamy would make a great dad. He could handle the emotional stuff; she would teach Madi how to be a warrior. The idea was oddly appealing.

“And tell Bell...”

 _No._ That was going too far. No matter what Clarke had done for her, for all of them; no matter what she was doing now, Echo wasn't going to bear the burden of her dying message to Bellamy.

“You can tell him, Clarke. If you stop stalling. Now let's go.”

It had been the right thing to say. Clarke's annoyance at the comment snapped her out of her sentimentality. Appearing to act on muscle memory, she plunged the needle in.

It took a few tries – she said she was trying to find the artery to make sure that the flow coming out of her arm would be more powerful than the blood pressure in his vein – but Echo was already tightening the sleeve around Bell's upper arm, doing her best to make his veins pop the way Clarke's had. His were far fainter and harder to discern.

But Clarke found one almost immediately. Echo watched as the black fluid made its down the tube from Clarke's arm to Bellamy's, and stained his veins around the needle's entry point. She supposed that was all the indication they were going to get that it was working.

“Do your best to get us back to the others,” Clarke said. “Try not to jostle us around too much – we don't want the needles coming loose.”

Echo was loathe to leave Octavia alone with them, but the girl was watching her brother's face as though she was mesmerized. Echo had to admit, it was hard to imagine her harming him now. Besides, someone had to drive the Rover.

She climbed back into the front seat, trying not to focus on the way Clarke's head was nodding on her chest, or the glazed panic in Octavia's eyes. _Hurtling across the desert in a death machine with a psychotic warrior staring down the Commander of Death, who's trying to bleed life into my boyfriend._ The absurdity of it struck her, and she startled herself by snorting with laughter.

Octavia must have misunderstood the sound, because her voice was full of worry when she asked, “what's wrong?”

The landscape in front of Echo began to blur as she picked up speed. “Nothing.” She wished Emori were here. There were some things that only a fellow Grounder who had been to space could understand.

_Earth Skills._

****************

In the end, it was a blown fuse. The simplicity of it was maddening to Raven, especially during the wasted minutes they spent trying to locate the fusebox. The yokel who had “hacked” into the computer had absolutely no mechanical knowledge of the ship. Luckily, the alarms that indicated the impending failure of the life support system only went off for 30 seconds once every ten minutes; otherwise, Raven wasn't sure she would have been able to string enough consecutive thoughts together to figure out how to prompt the computer to run a scan to identify the malfunction.

Once she replaced the fuse – after waiting an infuriating amount of time for him to find, and identify, an undamaged one in the ship's stores – the alarms were replaced with the contented hum and occasional beep of machinery in good order. It was one of her favorite sounds.

She wanted to pause and enjoy it for a moment, but the man was hovering over her shoulder.

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“How do we know it worked?”

She shrugged. “When all your friends fail to die in about twenty minutes.” At the look on his face, she rolled her eyes. “I'm just kidding. Listen – you can hear the hum. Everything's back online.” When he still looked doubtful, she said, “Fine, we'll ask the computer. Will you believe the computer?”

He agreed that he would; and when the scan came back indicating that all systems were operational, he heaved a sigh of relief.

“That means that the radiation in here has dropped to normal levels, too, you know; if it weren't it would have been flagged on the scan. Not that we tracked anything past your decontamination chamber, but you seem a little paranoid about it.”

As if on cue, the door to the small entryway that was sealed off from the rest of the ship whooshed open, and Monty emerged in a cloud of cool steam.

The man standing behind Raven, who had been in the process of cautiously unzipping the helmet to his suit, jumped back in a panic. “Close the door!”

“Hey, relax, man. The chamber decontaminates itself once it's run through its cycle. I've been checking to make sure it's working, and I made some improvements, too. It was pretty old-fashioned, with some jacked-up repairs... how old is this ship, anyway?”

The man shook his head and frowned, as though he hadn't heard Monty. “You're sure it's safe?”

“Hey.” For the first time, Raven processed how afraid he seemed. “Your computer would tell you if it wasn't. It's running scans for radiation _all_ the time. Like, more frequently than really makes sense, even given the circumstances. Whoever designed this ship was clearly a little paranoid about it.”

It made her think of Becca, with all of her fail-safes and back-up plans, and for a moment, she looked around the ship, chilled, as if in the presence of a ghost. But the ship had nothing of Becca's elegance or brilliance of design. It was … _clunky,_ was the only word that Raven could think of.

“How old _is_ this ship?”

The man had finally finished unzipping his helmet, and removed it cautiously, as though expecting to feel the burn of radiation at any moment. When nothing happened, he put it down, still frowning, and stepped out of the remainder of his radiation suit.

Without his suit, paradoxically, he didn't look quite so small. He was wearing a set of generic cotton scrubs, as though he was either a doctor or a patient in a medical unit – it was impossible to tell which. He was quite tall, and looked like someone who had once been broad and strong, but who had been sick for a long time. Patient, then, Raven decided. Still, he moved with the confidence of someone who was used to taking up space.

“I don't know.” He looked at their skeptical faces. “I really don't – I'm not bullshitting you. I was put on maybe... I don't know really, because of the life support system, but I'd guess maybe 15, 20 years? They wake us up every few years to run us through a series of tests, and then they put us back under. Or at least, they _were_ doing that. But this time when I woke up, it seemed like... no one was in charge. Just this guy with a gun and your friend. Clarke.”

Harper was frowning down at a stack of papers that she had found in a drawer under the command center. They looked like they were yellowed with age. Older than 15 years, Raven thought.

“You know Clarke.” Emori spoke up from the corner where she had planted herself, except when she'd moved to follow them to the fuse-box and back. She hadn't taken her rifle sight off the man since they'd entered the ship, but he seemed utterly indifferent to it.

“No. I don't _know_ her. I know that she saved my life with some kind of operation.” The man touched his hand to his throat, where a patch of gauze still clung. “I know that this guy with a gun seemed to want to keep her on-board, and she seemed to want to get off. That's really all I know.” He paused to consider. “Then again, that's probably more than I've known about anybody in more than a decade, so I guess you could call her my best friend.”

Emori was frowning. “But she introduced herself to you?”

“What? No.”

“Then how do you know her name?”

“Oh.” The man glanced down, briefly, as though he had been caught out in something. “Well, I sort of guessed. Based on … here.”

He sat at the computer, entered a few keystrokes, and the machine next to him began to hum and spit out paper.

“What the hell is that?” Raven asked, alarmed.

“What? The printer?”

“That thing that's... holy shit, how much paper is that?”

The man frowned, confused. “I don't know. It'll probably come out to about 20 pages. Here.”

Not seeming to understand how astonishing this was to Raven – who had only ever seen that much paper together in one place in the Ark library, and had definitely never seen a machine whose sole job was to transfer words that were already visible on a screen, to a stack of paper thicker than any one person on the Ark would have had access to in a year – he passed the bundle of paper over to her. Was he going to ask for it back? Was she allowed to keep it? The words were only on one side – for each page that printed, there was a whole back side of blank paper.

Then, she saw what she was holding in her hand, and forgot to think about the paper.

It was a log, evidently of any radio signals the ship picked up, tracked by day. Most days, there was only one entry. Some days there were two. But the entries always started the same way.

_Hey, it's Clarke...._

Most of the messages were for Bellamy, and Raven skimmed them quickly, feeling oddly like she was reading something deeply personal. 

But some of the messages were... _familiar._ Even though she was talking to Bellamy, the stories she told, the phrasing she used, seemed to echo back to Raven from her own distant memory. Almost like she was seeing one of her own dreams recounted to her – a dream that she couldn't quite recall after having woken up.

But then, she _had_ dreamed about Clarke, hadn't see? After Praimfaya. She didn't talk about it, and she tried not to think about it, and she never really remembered the dreams clearly. But she sometimes woke up feeling like she'd been in the middle of a conversation, but the gist of it was escaping her.

“Which one of you is Bellamy?” The man's tone was innocent enough, but suddenly the accumulation of messages in Raven's hand felt too personal, and she looked away. She felt as though she was reading, not Clarke's diary, but her _soul._

“He's not here,” she said curtly.

“What about Bellamy?” Monty tried to peer over Raven's shoulder to look at the sheath of papers.

“Nothing. It's just .... Clarke tried to radio us, I guess. While we were up there.” Raven fought the urge to hide the pages. She was glad Bellamy _wasn't_ here. “That's how they knew her name. They have a log of her calls. The ship must have been automatically monitoring and tracking radio waves.”

Monty looked stricken. “She was trying to radio us?”

Raven realized, too late, how sad it could appear – the idea of Clarke on the Ground, alone, sending unheard messages into the sky. How could she explain to Monty, without revealing too much of Clarke's heart, that it didn't _look_ sad when it was all laid out on paper? That it looked ... hopeful, and strong?

She shrugged, and now she did flip the pages over, trying to make it appear casual. “It's Clarke. You know her – practical to the end. She probably just wanted to make sure that we had her coordinates for when we did land.”

“That's all it was then? Coordinates?” Monty had clocked her furtive movement. He frowned. None of them were used to hiding things from each other – for six years, they'd counted on absolute trust and honesty to make their space exile tolerable.

“Basically. Some information about the landscape down here, things like that.” It was sort of true – from what Raven had glanced at, Clarke had included details of her day-to-day life in the missives.

The man raised his eyebrows at her, clearly registering that she was slanting the truth. He, after all, had read the messages himself. He had the option of calling her bullshit right then and there.

He didn't. Turning away, he closed out the log on the screen that revealed what Raven suspected Clarke would want to keep hidden. At least, Raven would, in her shoes. Had she thought the messages would ever be received, or had it just been something to do to keep her sane? Either way, it was different when there had been thousands of feet of atmosphere between them to diffuse the intensity of feeling. Now that they were all together again, it made Clarke almost unbearably vulnerable.

“What's your name?” She nodded at the man, who looked startled. He seemed to be on board with her decision to hide the messages, but she wanted a distraction anyway. Emori would want to see the papers; she always wanted to see everything.

“Oh – Benjamin. Ben.”

Raven introduced herself and the rest of them, figuring that whether or not she could trust the man to be a real ally, they might as well have something to call each other. It was the first new person they'd met in a long time, and she could see the interest it sparked in each of them. Each of them, that was, except for Harper, who barely looked up.

She was still frowning at the stack of papers in her hand. “Ben,” she said, indicating that she had at least been listening to some of what had been happening, “how long did you say you've been here again?”

“I told you, I'm really not sure. It could be as long as about 25 years.” He looked vaguely worried, as though it was only now occurring to him that there might be implications to his prolonged absence. “What's it like out there?”

“It's... not good.” Raven was unsure how to break the news of Praimfaya to someone who'd been in an induced coma for the past 25 years.

“Yeah, I was afraid of that. Did it happen? Did people make it to the shelters?”

“You know? About Praimfaya?” Monty looked as startled as Raven felt. How could he know about the nuclear reactors melting down? Unless one of the men who had first taken Clarke had known, and told him about it – but it hadn't seemed like they were really on speaking terms.

“Was that the name of the first bomb? What is that – Russian? I honestly thought it was going to be us. Maybe China.” He shrugged. “I mean, I don't _know_ anything. I just know that when they put us in here, things weren't looking good. It seemed like no matter what anyone did, the tension just kept rising. And everyone knew that all it would take would be one first strike to set the whole chain off.”

“First... strike?” It took Raven's brain a few seconds to catch up with what she was hearing, but by then, Harper was already speaking up.

“Ben?” Her voice was gentle. “Do you remember what year it was when you first came on board?”

“Yeah, of course, I'll never forget it. It was my brother's twelfth birthday. January 27, 2047. Almost exactly a decade after the U.S. launched the first civilian space station.” His brow furrowed as he seemed to note the growing concern on the faces of those around him. “Why?”

“Because,” Harper placed the sheath of yellowed papers she'd been looking at on the desk in front of him, pointing to something that Raven couldn't see. “It's been a bit more than 25 years.”

****************

Clarke was fading in and out, but she had been alert enough to register that Bellamy's wound had started clotting almost as soon as the Nightblood had entered his system. Interesting. It seemed the blood had more than just anti-radiation properties. She wasn't surprised; she'd been suspecting that she healed more quickly over the past few years than she had in the first 18 years of her life. She'd also noticed that she and Madi almost never got sick, and when they did, they recovered quickly.

The color had returned to Bellamy's cheeks, too, and he seemed to be breathing more deeply, but he still wasn't waking up. That worried her. She hadn't wanted to stop the transfusion until she was sure he'd turned the corner, but she didn't know how much of her own blood she'd already lost, and how much more she could afford. If it weren't for Madi, this would be an easier call, but she kept picturing the girl's face if Echo pulled up to camp with Clarke dead in the back. Madi had already been through too much – she didn't deserve to lose Clarke, too.

Just a few more minutes. She would give him a few more minutes, and if he hadn't come to by that time, she would end the transfusion and hope that what she had already done would be enough. She didn't let herself think about the possibility that it wasn't. She had already lived on this planet without him for 6 years, and she wasn't looking to repeat the experience.

It occurred to her, suddenly, that if she didn't make it, it wasn't only Madi she had to worry about. "O?"

Octavia looked up at her from her spot curled by Bellamy's side. It was the first time she'd taken her eyes off him since she'd started the transfusion, and as they met hers, Clarke realized that, set though they were in the same gaunt face, Octavia looked more like herself than she had since before entering the Wonkru bunker. She hoped it would last, whatever ended up happening with Bellamy.

“I didn't mean to do it, Clarke,” she whispered.

“I know. He'll understand.” But would he? She remembered his look of horror as Octavia had drawn the knife out, his last, desperate turn toward the entryway to the bunker. Had he been seeking Echo? Clarke wished that, if that were the case, she could have gotten the other woman to him before he'd collapsed. She wanted so desperately for his last conscious moments to have been peaceful ones.

 _Stop it. He'll have plenty of peaceful moments when he wakes up. The two of them can sit around in rocking chairs and grow old together, while you enjoy single motherhood. It's what you wanted, right? To be left alone with Madi. That's what you told him. And it's not the kind of thing you can take back. Raven may forgive you, but he never will._ The voice in her head – her own; no one else would be so cruel – snapped her out of her maudlin line of thought. 

“O, I think they're going to open the bunker. I don't know if I can stop them.” _I don't know if I'll be here to stop them._

“But... your mom's note.” Octavia spoke as if she was recalling a memory from long ago, and Clarke stilled. It was the first time she had talked about the note. When Clarke had tried to ask her about it in the past, she had merely stared at it blankly and turned away.

“So it _was_ my mom who wrote it, then?” Why did the confirmation shake her so deeply? She'd been the one to tell Bellamy that she was positive it was her mother's writing, and she had been. Still, to know for sure that her mother had, with the stroke of a pen, doomed what may have been all that was left of the human race to die in an underground bunker.... what the hell was going on down there?

“I know.” She swallowed her unease. “That's why I'm telling you. You might need to hide.”

“What about Madi?” Octavia was becoming more herself by the moment.

“We'll protect her.” Clarke spoke with more assurance than she felt. “And Echo promised me that she would, too.”

“Yeah, well, Echo's promises haven't been worth much in the past.”

“It's different now, I think. I don't know if it was living on the Ring, or being with Bellamy, but... I trust her. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but I do.”

Octavia nestled closer to Bell. “When he wakes up, he'll help talk them out of it. He can convince people of anything.”

Clarke decided not to tell Octavia that Bellamy might not be on their side on this one – and that even if he was, he might not be as willing as he once had been to prioritize O's needs over those of the group. She pictured him, gravely, informing Octavia that the vote had gone against her, that they would be unleashing the people who had tried to fry her to death.

She couldn't. She wondered if that was a failure of her imagination, or an indication that Bellamy's new commitment to democracy had limits.

“I just wanted you to be ready, in case...” There was a ringing in her ears. Could O hear it? But the other girl was peering at her with concern.

“Clarke? You don't look good.”

 _I don't feel good._ But the words were so heavy on her tongue that they wouldn't leave her mouth. As Octavia faded from her vision, she tried to reach out her hand to the girl, uncertain whether she was seeking to give, or to receive, comfort. In the end, it didn't matter. Her hand, leaden, remained limp and useless by her side as her field of vision grew as black as her blood.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another shorty. I'm trying to post a bit more often, so it sometimes means shorter chapters... also, I promise that not every section is going to end with someone dramatically passing out. Although, that would be a kind of a fun challenge.   
> Also-also, thanks as always for the comments and kudos! I really can't say enough how much I appreciate it when you take the time to give me feedback; I invest an embarrassing amount of myself into this, so when you care enough about it to let me know what you think, it honestly means the world to me. xo


	7. Chapter 7

Ben kept flipping back and forth among the papers, as though somewhere he would find an explanation for the hundred years that he had lost.

“But... it's _all_ gone? All of it? No survivors? Who are you, then?” His tone was accusatory, as though he'd caught them in lie.

“There _were_  survivors. For a long time, we thought we were the only ones - the thirteen space stations.” The others seemed to be letting Harper do most of the talking. Monty was hovering behind her, as though ready to step in if the task was too arduous. _A microcosm of their relationship,_ Raven thought, and then chastised herself for being cruel.

“Thir _teen?_ ”

“I don't know how many had launched when you went under, but by the time the bombs dropped, there were thirteen up there, yeah. The 12 nations plus Polaris... but that's another story. We'll tell you about it sometime. The point is that later, we found out that there were survivors on the earth, too. People who managed to keep going on the Ground, and a group of people who had created an entire society in a massive underground complex that was designed to keep people alive under there indefinitely.”

“Mount Weather?” Ben sounded disbelieving. “It's real?”

“You know about Mount Weather?” Raven found herself stepping in, impatiently. She understood that Harper wanted to give the guy a gentle introduction to his new reality, but they needed to know more about the ship. It was, after all, a prison ship – for all they knew, they were making themselves comfortable with a murderer. She wanted to know exactly who was on board, and why. “How?”

He glared at her, as if resenting the interruption. “How do you think they got me to sign up for … all this? If you haven't noticed, it's not your typical prison ship. Or at least, it wasn't, back when … I mean, I don't _think_ it's typical.” His eyes, unfocused, drifted to his feet. He was starting to lose it, Raven thought. The strain of finding out that a hundred years had passed without his knowledge was derailing his concentration. She had to get any relevant information out of him before he started blubbering about his lost family.

To her surprise, though, he gathered himself without help, and when he looked back to her his eyes were as cool and impenetrable as metal. “We're criminals. I mean, I guess you knew that. Mostly non-violent offenders, or that's what they told us. All of us were juveniles at the time of our arrest, so we got this … option. I guess they figured we were disposable, but still young enough to be of use. Everyone was healthy when they on-boarded us – that was important. For the experiments.”

Raven's stomach plunged at the word. “Experiments?”

“Yeah... that's what the ship is for. You didn't know?” He frowned. “We all signed on to be the first human trials for an anti-radiation drug.”

Raven felt like she was missing something. “So... you _signed up_ to be experimented on? And put in suspended animation between trials?”

He shrugged. “I guess that's what they were doing, yeah. I all I know is, I would wake up, have a physical, get a shot, and get put back under. They said they were going to wake us every few weeks but it was really clear after the first few times that years had passed... like, it would be the same staff, but they would have aged, gone gray, whatever. They never talked about it to us. And we were never allowed to ask about anything that was happening...” he gestured to the walls of the ship. “Out there. I think they probably thought that we'd panic, but we knew what we were here for. None of _us_ were ever going to be allowed into the shelters.”

At the mention of experimentation, Emori had lowered her gun and stepped forward. “So you just... let them do that to you? So that you could survive the fallout?” She shook her head, slowly. “I'd rather fry.”

“Yeah, I would have, too, except survival wasn't the only thing they offered us.” He sighed, heavily. “Look, sit down, okay?”

They didn't. He let the moment of silence stretch on. “Okay... fine, don't sit down. _I'm_ going to sit down. I think my legs are still atrophied.” He did, heavily, in the chair in front of the command vestibule. Only then did Raven join him, parking herself across from him on a stool, most of her weight still in her good foot so that she could jump back up if she needed to. The others circled them, like bodyguards, or an audience at a play.

“I got arrested for identity theft. I know it's a shitty thing to do but... it was just so _easy,_ you know? The numbers were all just out there, flying through cyberspace, and all I had to do was reach out to grab them. Then I sold them on to the highest bidder, and the profits kept my mom's rent paid up, funded Christmas for my family...” He shrugged, defensively. “I'm not trying to make myself sound like Robin Hood. It was nice being able to afford the same shoes as everyone else at school for once, too.”

There was so much foreign material in this simple speech that Raven felt like she needed a translator. Monty's “How do you steal someone's identity?” overlapped with Emori's, “What's a Christmas?” And that wasn't even touching “cyberspace,” or “Robin Hood.”

Raven held up her hand. “Let's hold our questions, okay? Otherwise we'll be here all... hey, what time is it? What's going on with... the others?” She didn't want to say Madi's name. For some reason, it didn't seem wise to let a stranger know that they had a kid with them.

“I checked on them when I was working on the decontamination chamber. Filled them in. They're fine. She's asleep.” Monty seemed to pick up on her reluctance to identify Madi.

“Okay, so go on. You stole people's identities for shoes and Christmas, and then you got caught. What happened next?”

His brow creased, as though there were corrections he was itching to make, but he seemed to let it go. “So... I don't even know what I have to explain to you. Do you have, like, jail? Or courts?”

“Of course,” Raven spoke scornfully.

“Okay, well, apparently you don't have Christmas, so...”

She rolled her eyes. “I know what Christmas is. It's a day in December celebrated by the Christian religion, using conventions and ceremonies appropriated from the pagans that they forcibly converted. We learned about it in school.”

“OK... that, I guess.” He frowned. “Also, there are, like, presents.”

“Sounds neat. You were saying? About jail?”

“Right. So, OK, I was going to have to stay in Juvie – that's a juvenile detention center, it's where we send – sent – kids who commit crimes until they're adults.”

“Yeah, we had something similar.” _Do your kids get re-evaluated for execution on their 18 th birthday, or was that just us?_

“Since I was almost eighteen, it would have meant only a few months inside, plus probation. I figured I could swing that, no problem. But a few weeks into my sentence, some guys in suits came to see me.” His gaze had lost focus again, but this time, Raven wasn't worried that he would lose the thread of the story. He seemed to be lost in the past. “They said that my brother had been getting into some trouble at school, but that they were willing to help him – get him extra support, make sure he didn't end up suspended, or worse. That was important – my mom didn't have a lot of time to help us with homework, but school was important to her, so she always made sure I stayed up with my brother to help him finish his. He's – he _was_ – a smart kid, and I knew what a waste it would be if he didn't graduate.

“They said that all I had to do to help him was to participate in this medical trial. They were really up-front about it – they admitted that the animal trials had been rushed, and that they had no idea what would happen when they used the stuff on humans. But they said that it was important research, given the way things seemed to be going. Everyone who had any money to spare sunk it into these massive, fully stocked bomb shelters, but these men said that they didn't think that even rich people were prepared for how long they would have to live underground, if the worst happened. And no one I knew had any kind of money for that – we all just kind of knew that if the bombs dropped, we were dead. No one even thought about survival.

“But these men said that they were working on developing a drug – like, basically, gene therapy – to help people become resistant to radiation. I can't say that I understood what they were talking about, but they said that they were close to figuring out a gene that could make a human immune to radioactive fallout – and that they were so close to getting it right, it could be a game-changer, if the worst happened. It could mean the difference between survival and extinction for all of humanity.”

Raven glanced at Monty, and saw him looking back at her, equally perplexed. Had the men been talking about Nightblood? Had they, independently, come close to creating what Becca would eventually perfect?

“To be honest, I probably would have said yes at that point.” Ben continued, seemingly unaware of their reaction. “I didn't really have much hope that the great leaders of the world were going to get their act together – I guess I was right to be skeptical, as it turns out – and the idea of helping to save humanity was pretty good. I'd always known that my most important job was to protect my brother, anyway, and this was the only way I could do it from behind bars.

“But I guess they were worried that we'd all pull out when we understood the magnitude of it – that we were agreeing to sleep away the next few decades, if we survived at all – because they didn't stop with that. They said that the government had been preparing for this for a long time, and there were places – underground complexes, just like you said – where cultural treasures were being stored, places that were being prepared for a few hundred people to ride out the apocalypse. Most of the people who got in were government officials, scientists, even a few rich bastards who managed to buy their way in. But these men said that every person who participated in the trial got to choose one person on the outside who would automatically get a spot.”

“Your brother.” Raven thought of Bellamy, and of how he had been willing to throw away not only his own life, but Jaha's, to live or die by Octavia's side on Earth. She had never known anyone else who'd had a sibling. Her family, like Clarke, Finn and the Kru, had always been earned – forged in the twin fires of desperation and hope. What must it be like to have that just by virtue of being born? It was nearly unimaginable, but she could understand how it was something that people seemed willing to die for.

“Yeah.” His eyes were back on hers. He was firmly in the present again. She wondered if he was keeping himself from wondering what had happened to his brother when the bombs fell. She didn't know anything about these men in suits, but she didn't quite trust them to have kept their word. “So I did it. I know that all the other people on this ship met the same criteria – young, healthy, non-violent criminals with someone they would be willing to die to protect. Other than that, I don't know anything about them.”

“Not _all_ the people on this ship.” As usual, Emori was listening for what wasn't being said. “You said that people woke you up to run tests – staff, or whatever. There must have been scientists. Doctors. People to keep the machines running.”

“I guess.” This point seemed oddly unimportant to him. “The first few rounds of wake-ups, there definitely were. Then... I don't know. Now that I think about it, the first few times were definitely consistent, but after that, the faces who were waking us up were always changing. And they seemed... different. Younger, and less sure of themselves, I guess. Not who I picture when I think of a doctor.”

Raven thought of Abby, desperately radioing surgical instructions to Clarke, still - looking back now - a frightened kid. But at this point, Raven wouldn't put it past her to perform neurosurgery.

She shrugged. “Maybe circumstances changed over time and they had to improvise – maybe there _were_ no doctors left, after a while.”

“But where were the staff coming from?” Emori was unwilling to let it go. “It's not like they could hire more people from outside. There _were_ no more people from outside.”

“They offered them the same deal they offered the prisoners.” Harper had returned to sorting through the stack of yellowing papers. Now she held some out for inspection. “Their contracts – see? It has their position on there. Chief medical consultant, chief engineer, head of laboratory A, head of laboratory B.”

“The higher-ups would have been older,” Raven realized slowly. “They would have been the first to die.”

“Leaving people like... yikes. Second engineer in charge of waste disposal... lab technician... lab technician... lab technician... a _lot_ of lab techs. That would explain why the people running the tests seemed less sure of themselves as time went on. They didn't have the expertise.”

“So why keep running the tests? That's crazy.” Ben looked understandably alarmed at who had been prodding him with needles.

“Because they needed the data. Come look at this.” Raven hadn't realized that Monty wasn't with them anymore until she heard his voice ring out from the rear of the ship.

When they found him, he was standing by a familiar-looking plexiglass cylinder, slightly larger than the suspended animation chambers on the rest of the ship. When Emori saw it, she gasped. Raven felt her own lips draw back in distaste. None of them had positive associations with the machine.

“A radiation chamber,” Emori breathed.

“They must have been desperate. I wonder if they were testing people in this.” Monty, who hadn't been there when they'd run the experiment in Becca's lab, could ask the question with relative neutrality in his voice.

“Jesus. You think?” Ben's eyes widened. Raven envied his feeling of shock - he clearly couldn't imagine  _anyone_ running that kind of trial, let alone doing it himself. 

“They knew that it was a wasteland out there; even when they were past the point of hoping that their families had made it into the bunker, their only hope of survival was to keep working for some way to resist the radiation. It would have been the only way to get back to the ground.” Monty was still the only one speaking; Raven was aware of the silence of the others who had been complicit in their own human trial.

And yesterday, something had changed. They _had_ come back to the ground. Did that mean they had found something?

“They must have run trials between being put under themselves. God, what a weird way to live.” Ben didn't seem to be thinking about why the ship had landed – he was still staring in horror at the radiation chamber.

“Do you think any of them are left? The staff?” Raven didn't know what answer she was hoping for. If there were, they might get more answers about the ship, the people on it, and the research they'd conducted. But they were also, presumably, the people responsible for putting human beings into that chamber, and turning the radiation on them. 

She tried to ignore the tiny voice reminding her that she had done the same.

“Why didn't you want us to wake them up?” She remembered his response when she had suggested it, in anticipation of the life support systems failing.

“Well, for one thing, the last guy I talked to on the ship seemed like kind of a psycho. That said, I think that most of the people on this ship are relatively innocent. But I don't know if they're sick from the trials, and if waking them up will hurt them or help them. Even if they're OK, waking them up means increasing our use of resources, and since none of us can leave the ship, that seems kind of short-sighted.”

“But that's not the only reason,” Raven prompted.

“No,” he admitted. “It's not. I said that most of these people are relatively innocent, and I believe that. But we don't have any way of really knowing, do we? Right now I'm in charge – _we're_ in charge. But if we wake up these people, and some of them are the people who were performing experiments, while others were the ones being experimented on – doesn't it seem like that could get ugly, fast?”

Raven remembered what Bell had told her of the first days on the ground, when it seemed like the Hundred were going to be destroyed by competing factions within themselves before the Grounders ever got a crack at them. He had taken control, even when it meant ignoring the free will of other people. She didn't know whether it had been the right or the wrong choice, but she knew what it had cost him. 

The silence lingered, until it was broken by the noises outside – slamming doors and raised voices. The others were back, and they weren't making any effort to be stealthy.

Something was wrong.

****************

When his eyelids fluttered, Octavia thought she was imagining it again. She had been staring at his face for hours, and at times she'd mistaken the vibrations of the Rover for signs of life. It happened so many times that she was beginning to be afraid that what she thought was the movement of his breath would turn out to be an illusion, too - that he had actually died hours ago.

At first, she had been sure the transfusion would save him, just as it had saved her. She found herself rubbing the scar on the crook of her elbow like a good luck charm. But as time went by and he didn't wake up, she didn't understand what was wrong.

_You're being punished._

For what?

_For what happened in the bunker. You couldn't save them, and now you can't save him._

Octavia tried to ignore the voice of the ghost. She had been equal parts fearful and hopeful that he would go away when she opened the doors in her brain, but he was still there, talking over the cacophony of other spirits. He was the one who had told her when to stop the transfusion and bandage Clarke's arm. That had been hours ago, but Clarke still hadn't moved. She wondered how long she was going to be asleep.

_Asleep? You're not a child. She's dead._

No. _No._ Her chest was still moving. She was breathing.

_Is it? Can you trust your own eyes? You've imagined him waking up ten times already, and yet, he's still lying there._

Had Linc been like this when he was alive? She didn't remember his voice being so hard, so unrelenting. Had be ever really been this cruel?

_Maybe being murdered changes a person._

She shook her head, once, sharply, and the movement of it jostled Bellamy. This time, there was no mistaking the movement. He gasped, and his eyes flew open.

“Bellamy!” She turned to Clarke, as if their consciousnesses were somehow linked, and Clarke had only been waiting for him before opening her eyes.

But Clarke lay still as stone.

She turned back to Bellamy, ready for his rage, or fear. She knew that she was the one who had stabbed him, even though that person no longer felt like _her._ But he had no way of knowing that, and if he woke up to her face, he might panic.

He did look like he was panicking, but he wasn't looking at her; he seemed to be looking through her instead. Wildly, he thrashed his head from side to side, like a dying man seeking oxygen. She tried to grab it, to still him before he re-opened the wound, but he kept pulling away.

Finally, in her efforts to restrain him, she moved aside, and he caught a glimpse of Clarke.

The effect was immediate. He stilled in Octavia's arms like a child, and his rigid muscles went limp.

“Princess.” It was whispered so softly that she wouldn't have heard it if her ear hadn't been inches from her ear. She pulled away quickly, feeling as though she was eavesdropping on something not meant for her.

But he didn't say anything else. He simply watched Clarke for a moment, and then, as though afraid of what he would find, turned towards Octavia, waiting silently by his side. He searched her face for a long moment, and she thought that he was going to speak; but whatever he saw must have been enough for him, because he let out a long sigh before his breathing, again, became deep and even. This time, when he closed his eyes to sleep, there was no hint of death in the soft, contented landscape of his face.

****************

John had been surprised when Madi dropped off to sleep on the ground beside him, but he wasn't about to wake her up. He could tell Clarke that she'd slept – that would be good. _Nanny of the year._

He wondered what the others were getting up to, and thought about going to check it out – it had been a while since there were any signs of life from the ship. There also hadn't been any gunfire, thought, and he knew that Emori wouldn't go down without a fight.

As always, his heart hurt when he thought about her, and the careful way she avoided his gaze these days. He wasn't sure what had happened – only that she'd told him that she would always love him, and that they also couldn't be together anymore. That didn't make any sense to him, but he knew that she was smarter than he was, so he assumed that it was probably the right decision. It just didn't _feel_ right.

Then again, maybe it wasn't about what was right for him. Maybe it only mattered that it was right for her – and he had to admit that, based on his track record, she might be better off without him.

He looked at the still, sleeping figure by his side, and thought, not for the first time, that he could leave. There was nothing keeping him with these people anymore, now that Emori had cut him loose. And with all of them occupied... he had paid better attention this time to the route they took to get here, and he knew he could make it back to camp, grab some weapons and some food, and set off. He didn't know where he would go, but he could survive on his own. He always did.

And whatever game Clarke was playing with him by putting him in charge of her kid would be over. He didn't understand why she had picked him, but something about the way she'd looked at him when she did had scared the shit out of him. She looked at him like she'd finally figured something out, seen some piece of him that he'd managed to keep hidden until now. He didn't know what it was that she thought she saw, and he had no interest in knowing. Whatever it was, it made her trust him enough to leave Madi with him, so he knew that it was only a matter of time until he shattered the illusion and she was back to looking right through him – or, worse, that they would _all_ be back to looking at him the way they had on the dropship. Back when he really did deserve his nickname.

That was the thing, thought – they all looked at him differently now, like he was one of _them._ Like he wasn't a murderer. Sure, they'd all made mistakes – except maybe Saint Monty – but for the rest of them, their mistakes – no matter how awful – had all been in the interest of the greater good.

None of _them_ had murdered anyone for vengeance. None of _them_ had driven a little girl off of a cliff for no crime greater than being the one who'd illuminated exactly how worthless, how disposable, he was to the rest of them, how easily Bellamy had been willing to turn on him. Even loving Emori hadn't been enough to save his soul. She'd seen that, somehow, and saved her own by getting away from him. He was, if he was totally honest with himself, surprised she'd stuck around as long as she had. She sure as hell deserved better than anything he had to offer.

But _he_ didn't have to stick around to watch as the rest of them figured out what he'd known all along – that for some crimes, there is no redemption. That the more they tried to shine the light of forgiveness on him, the darker his shadow of self-loathing would become. And in the end, that shadow was stronger than he could ever be.

He would leave, then. No question.

He looked again at the girl by his side. Her eyebrows were drawn together, worried even in her sleep. He placed a hand, lightly, on the top of her head, and the lines of her forehead smoothed out.

He _would_ go. Just ... not yet. There was no point in risking the kid's safety by leaving her here all on her own. There would be plenty of opportunities to leave – he would see this through, first. _Then_ he would leave. No question.

****************

Echo had heard the whisper from the backseat. He was alive, then. That was all that mattered. Not what he had said when he woke up – only that he woke up at all.

She could see a blur of green in the distance, which meant she hadn't managed to get them off track. That was good, too. Nothing but good news, she told herself, and tried to ignore her heart as it whimpered quietly and slunk down into the pit of her stomach.

Well, good. Let it take a nice long rest down there, and come out when it was ready to be useful. She didn't need it up here near her brain, causing all kinds of problems.

She focused on the landscape ahead of her – the last thing she needed was to blow a tire or careen off course now that they were so close. Bellamy may be out of the woods, but she hadn't heard the sound of Clarke's voice in a long time, and Octavia wasn't exactly great about providing regular updates.

She had heard, too, the conversation that Clarke and Octavia had had about her, and knew what Clarke said about trusting her. She wished, absurdly, to have had more time with Clarke. She wanted to explain that she hadn't changed at all, really. She would still lie, cheat and kill, without a second thought. She still had no problem betraying anyone who wasn't one of her people.

It was her _people_ who had changed. And now, Clarke was one of them, whether either one of them wanted it or not.

“Hey,” she called back.

“No change,” Octavia responded, before she could ask the question.

For the first time, she allowed herself to seriously contemplate what would happen if Bellamy survived, and Clarke didn't. Echo would be a parent, for one thing. That was troubling, to say the least.

But it wasn't the worst thing. The worst thing would be explaining to Bellamy that she had allowed Clarke, again, to sacrifice herself to save him. And that this time, there _had_ been a choice, and it had been to save _just_ him, not everyone. She had a feeling he'd have an especially hard time with those last points.

Well, screw him, then. Let him mope for another six years, or a lifetime. Let him blame Echo, if it would keep him from blaming himself – or Octavia. She didn't think he could bear it if he lost both Clarke _and_ Octavia, all over again.

God, she was sick of thinking about what Bellamy would or wouldn't be able to bear. What about what _she_ could bear? She thought it even as her heart called up the unhelpful truth from the pit of her stomach.

She could bear anything that this vicious planet had in store for her, except losing him.

****************

Madi opened her eyes and knew something was wrong.

He was getting on the rocket. He was coming back. Was that the problem?

No. She hated him, but Clarke loved him, and it was right that he should be here.That wasn't the cause of the dark foreboding in her mind that hadn't been there before. She probed the still, dark room where the voices went when she wasn't talking to them.

 _Scared?_ Bellamy's voice was quiet, but not as mocking as usual.

No. I'm not.

 _You are. But it's OK to be scared._ She waited for him to add something cruel, but nothing came. It was disconcerting.

 _The fear is a compass – it's pointing you in a direction._ Echo's voice was cool and assured, as usual. _Where is it pointing?_

Madi scanned around her. John was sitting beside her, dozing. She didn't want to wake him up.

 _I appreciate that._ His voice in her head was dry.

There. In the distance. A tiny cloud of dust was rolling across the Waste toward them, coming from the direction of the store.

 _They're coming back._ The voice was quiet and barbed. Unreadable.

Octavia?

 _Get ready._ Then it was gone.

“They're coming back,” she whispered. Without thinking about it, she reached out and grabbed hold of John's hand.

He started awake, looking confused for a moment. There was a shadow on his face that she hadn't seen before, and it scared her, a little.

But she didn't pull away, even when he looked at her and saw how scared she was. That was the thing about John – there was no point in trying to hide fear from him. He could always recognize it, since fear was the one thing he knew better than anything else.

The shadow didn't leave his face, but he took her hand in both of his, and held on tight.

****************

The second time Bellamy woke up, he knew where he was.

Before, he had managed to hold onto consciousness just long enough to see that he had made it – that the rocket had brought him home. He knew that it was home because Clarke and Octavia were there. And he knew that he hadn't died and gone to Hell - or the Underworld, he thought, recalling Madi - because Clarke was sleeping peacefully, and Octavia was herself, not the demon he'd caught a glimpse of before.

But now, when he opened his eyes, it was Octavia who was dozing, and Clarke...

There was something wrong. It wasn't just peace that made her lie so still. She was...

 _Not dead._ He wouldn't let her be dead. He hadn't come back to let her die.

He sat up suddenly, and grew so dizzy that almost passed out again. What the hell had happened?

“Hey!” The voice shook his memories loose, and they began to arrange themselves into the correct order. Oh, right – Octavia had happened. She had stabbed him. No time to think about that now.

“You need to lie down.” Her voice was more tremulous than he recalled it being, but there was no question that she was herself, not demon-Octavia.

“What happened to Clarke?” He would lie down later.

“She... well, she saved you.”

“From you?” He hadn't intended it to sound accusatory, but Octavia lowered her eyes in shame. He forced himself to take a more patient tone. “I don't care, O, I just need to find out what happened.”

“You weren't waking up,” Octavia said, as though that explained anything.

The voice from the front seat flooded him with relief, and something else. Sadness? A fleeting memory of the Ring glanced off his mind and then flew away. In it, he was standing on the launch pad – but not with Echo, the way he had on their last day. With someone else. But he was thinking about her, and for some reason, the thought of her had flooded him with sadness... why?

It didn't matter. He could figure it out after Clarke woke up.

“You were dying, so she gave you her blood. Evidently, a lot of it. And it worked.” Echo's voice was matter-of-fact, but he thought he caught a hint of trepidation under it.

He looked at Clarke's pale, still face, and gritted his teeth. If she made it through, he would kill her.

“And you _let_ her?”

“I couldn't have stopped her. Besides, I didn't just let her. I _helped_ her. And if you're going to take that tone with me, I suggest you remember that I can knock you back out. Especially in your current condition.” Again, Echo's voice was superficially calm, but there was a current of worry running beneath it. “Bell, it's over with, OK? You're fine, and she's going to be fine. You know that saving your ass is basically her hobby. Keeps her busy.”

“We're almost back at camp.” Octavia's tone was pleading. “Besides, she was out for a while after the last one, too. It takes a lot of energy to regenerate all that blood.”

He noted the comment about “the last one,” but was too distracted to pursue it.

“OK, well, let's transfuse it back to her. We can do that, right? How do we do that?” He began to root around for the needle and plastic tubing that he recalled seeing by his side when he woke up.

But Octavia was shaking her head. “She's Nightblood, Bell. That's why it worked. It wouldn't work the other way.”

“Plus, then _you'd_ pass out again, and we'd have to have this exact same conversation with _her_ when she woke up.” Bellamy knew that Echo was trying to distract him by teasing him, but he couldn't bring himself to respond. He couldn't concentrate on anything but Clarke's lashes, dark against her pale cheeks. What had possessed her?

But he knew the answer to that. It was the same thing that was possessing him, now, as he desperately tried to connect the tubing to the needle with shaking hands.

“ _Bell._ ” Finally, Echo turned around in her seat and met his eyes. Bellamy vaguely noted that she wasn't watching the road in front of her, and wondered if he should feel concerned about that. He didn't. “Stop. You need to stop. Clarke did it because she knew that she'd be fine.” He didn't believe her for a second. “If you try to do this, you are going to hurt her. Do you understand me? She _will_ die, and it will be your fault.” She returned her eyes to the road just in time to swerve around a giant pothole.

It was the only thing that could get through to him. _She will die, and it will be your fault._

But just because he couldn't give her his blood, it didn't mean that he had to sit here, helpless.

“Echo, you're going to run us off the road.” He tested himself, sitting up straight and noting no dizziness this time. “Pull over. If we need to get her back to camp, then I'm driving.”

****************

By the time Raven ran out, Bellamy and Echo were already out of the Rover, shouting at Murphy to hold Madi back. Madi was struggling against him and screaming.

“What did you do to her? I knew I shouldn't have brought you back!”

It was nonsense, but it seemed to stun Bellamy. He knelt in front of the girl. “She's going to be fine, OK? She's just.... resting.”

“I want to see her!” Madi's right hand, windmilling, caught Bellamy full in the face, leaving a long, raw scratch and an angry red mark. Raven couldn't tell if she'd done it on purpose, but Bellamy didn't pull away.

“You _can._ You just need to calm down first, alright? The screaming and the commotion won't be good for her.”

It was like a spell. Immediately, Madi stilled.

There was only one “she” that they could be talking about. Raven's heart sank. Was this the way it was always going to be – every reunion, every piece of good news bookended by illness, injury, and loss? She started towards the Rover at a limping run when the sight of another woman getting out of the back stopped her short.

Madi threw her arms around... it couldn't be. The face was Octavia's, but she looked so _shrunken._ So frail. Octavia had never looked that way, not even before her training. Raven was afraid that the force of the younger girl's body was going to knock her over.

But when Madi hit Octavia at a dead run and threw her arms around her, Octavia stayed on her feet. In fact, it seemed to give her strength. She leaned over and spoke in the girl's ear. Raven was barely close enough to hear the hoarse voice – hoarse, but full of authority.

“It was my fault. Not Bellamy's, mine.” Madi pulled back and looked at O with anguish on her face. Octavia pulled her back and kissed the top of her head. “Babe, I promise I'll tell you about it. But for now, Clarke needs to hear your voice.”

Madi looked, slowly, from Octavia to Bellamy and back again, as though she was trying to work out a puzzle, but she couldn't quite find all the pieces. “Are you... better?”

Octavia followed her glance to Bellamy, and smiled sadly. “Sort of. I guess I'm better than I was, yeah. But...I need my Second, OK? I need you to stay strong and go sit with Clarke.”

The girl straightened in response to the command, and approached the back of the Rover slowly.

Madi was Octavia's Second? How was that possible? Unless... had Madi been in the bunker, somehow? But how had she gotten out with everyone else still inside?

Raven gave up on trying to figure it out, resolving to find out later. There was a lot of information getting filed under the “find out later” category, she realized. “Later” was going to involve a lot of very intense conversations.

She reached Echo just as Madi reached the entrance to the Rover. “Is Clarke OK?”

Echo shrugged, uncomfortably. “There was... an accident. Bellamy was bleeding out, so Clarke did a transfusion.”

“A _blood_ transfusion? Like, in the Rover? It's not exactly a hospital. Why would you let her do that?”

“OK, why does everyone keep acting like I had any say in the matter? Besides, she was surprisingly prepared. Everything went fine... except that she's still unconscious.”

“Bell, are you OK? Bellamy. _Bellamy.”_ But he wasn't listening. His eyes were on the small figure, hesitantly perched by the opening to the Rover, eyes wide. Now that she had the access she'd been demanding, she seemed afraid to go in.

John and Raven both started for her, but Bellamy got there first. Raven tensed for an explosion, but Madi just looked up at him with wide eyes, and swallowed hard. Raven recognized that swallow – she remembered it from when her mother would be out all night, or came home again with moonshine instead of food. It was the swallow of a kid who couldn't afford to let herself cry, but who couldn't quite speak around the lump in her throat.

“Hey.” Bellamy knelt in front of her and spoke gently.

This time, Madi's hands stayed by her side. She whispered, “she's in the Underworld, isn't she?”

It seemed to take him a moment to understand what she was saying, and then his face transformed with comprehension. Now, he really did look like Madi had slapped him. “Hey – no.  _No._ She's not.” He made a movement toward Madi, but stopped himself. “She's just resting, OK? She's going to be fine.”

The girl's voice had a shrill note of fear. “But what if she _isn't_ fine?” Raven wondered if Bellamy should have gone ahead and let himself hug her – she looked like she needed it. “What if she _is_ in the Underworld? I can't follow her there, you know. Not like...”

Raven was worried that Madi was becoming hysterical. Bellamy looked confused as well, but then understanding again dawned on his face. And something else - fear? “Then I'll get her. If she's in the Underworld, Madi, I'll go get her. I _swear._ And I won't look back.”

It was a stupid thing for him to say. He, like Raven, had been on this planet long enough to know that you couldn't make promises like that. If Clarke was dead, she was dead. There was nothing he, or anyone else, could do about it. The thought made Raven's heart curl into a shell of itself, but she wouldn't let herself off the hook by making promises she couldn't keep to a 13 year old girl. “Bellamy...” She tried to keep the sharpness out of her voice.

He didn't look at her, but held Madi's gaze. “I promise, Madi. OK? I _promise.”_

“ _Bellamy.”_ This time, she didn't worry about her tone. Still, neither looked at her. Madi held Bellamy's gaze for another long moment, and then nodded. He sat back, letting her go. When he spoke again, it was as though the intensity of the past few moments hadn't happened.

“She'll want to hear your voice.” Without waiting for a response, he boosted Madi into the Rover. She was tall enough to get in herself, but Raven wondered if he wanted a way to give her some version of the hug that she wouldn't have accepted from him otherwise.

He climbed in beside her without waiting for an invitation. When she still hesitated, he took her hand and placed in in Clarke's, so that his own was holding both of theirs. Kneeling beside them both, his tall frame protectively shielding them from view, he looked like nothing so much as a medieval knight at the feet of his queen, attentive and on guard.

Or, if not a knight, then... Raven turned to Echo, wanting somehow to protect her from the sight and Raven's own sudden recognition of what the tableau really meant – but it was too late. Echo's eyes, defiant and unguarded, had followed every move.

 _A father._ Unthinking, Raven placed her own hand in consolation on Echo's arm. Not a knight. _A father, with his family._

****************

Echo couldn't see Clarke's face, but she could see in the muscles on Bellamy's back that something had changed. Almost as soon as Madi began whispering in Clarke's ear, Bellamy's hand still holding hers, his entire frame had relaxed. Echo didn't need to wait to find out what that meant.

Clarke was waking up.

Echo turned to Raven. She was beginning to feel that she was spying on the scene before them, and was desperate for a distraction. She'd had every intention of asking Raven about the ship and the survivors on board – if there still were any – but what came out of her mouth was, “When did you know?”

“What?” Raven, by unspoken consensus, had also turned her back on the Rover and was beginning to make her way back to the ship. 

Echo almost couldn't bear to ask it again. She looked down at her own feet and their progress over the sparse grass. They were on the edge of the green, and every step they took away from the Rover took them further into the edge of the Waste. The ground beneath their feet was growing more barren by the step.

She forced herself to respond. “With Finn. And Clarke. When did you know to... ”

Raven stopped walking, and for a moment Echo was afraid that she was going to be angry, to tell her to mind her own business. But Raven just looked up at the sky, squinting thoughtfully against the glare of the setting sun, and then her gaze back on the ground. 

“To call it quits? I guess.... I knew before I knew. You know?”

“I really don't.” _Don't mess with me,_ Echo pleaded silently. _Just tell me what to do._

“The moment he pulled me out of that drop-ship, I could see that things were different. And when I found that little two headed deer that he'd made for Clarke... I _knew._ I was too late. I was giving CPR to a love that died as soon as he'd set foot on the ground.”

She still didn't look at Echo, and Echo was thankful for this illusion of dignity. Raven went on. “But for me to have let myself _know_ that, then ...”

“After you'd come to Earth for him.”

“That was part of it, yeah. But to be honest, I didn't come to Earth just for him. I did it for Abby, and the delinquents. And because I honestly believed it was the only way forward for the human race... and for myself, really. Because I wanted to live a big life. Not like my mother, or like anyone I'd ever known. 

"But to admit all of that them – to admit that maybe I didn't need him the way I thought I did, and that he _definitely_ didn't need me – it would have been like... like a kind of death. He'd always been my only family, and I didn't understand that that wasn't going to change, even if we stopped dating.” She shook her head in frustration. “Is any of this making sense?”

“Not really, no.” That wasn't true – it did make sense, it just wasn't what Echo wanted to hear. She didn't need to know that things had always been more complicated than they'd appeared – she needed them to be _simpler._

“OK, well, try this. I told myself that I couldn't bear to lose him, and that made it true. So I ignored... everything. We were all so stupid back then, you know? I was dumb enough to think that he could go to Earth without me and it wouldn't change anything; he was dumb enough to think he could choose who he loved. Even Clarke...” Echo felt Raven's eyes on her, but when she looked over, Raven was looking back at the ground. “Even Clarke was dumb, mistaking anger for _not_ being in love.

"We all would have changed what was happening, if we could. And if we could have, maybe he'd still be alive.” She spoke lightly, but the simple statement took Echo's breath away. How could she live with that thought and not be on fire with rage every second of every day? “But we couldn't. And he's not. And if I had it to do again...”

 _I would have held onto him._ The thought completed itself in Echo's head without permission, but when Raven spoke next, she said only, “I wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to change what couldn't be changed.” Now she did turn to Echo, and spoke with such an intensity that it seemed like a piece of her  _was_ on fire. But not with rage. “He was dying. None of us knew it yet, but we were in the middle of his last days. And I had the power to set him free, to let him be with the person he really loved. Instead, I tried too hard to hold on. I wasted time resenting them both, and in the end, he was miserable when he could have felt loved. Who knows, maybe that would have saved, him, too. I doubt it, though. If I'm honest with myself, I doubt anything could have saved him.”

“It wasn't your job to make him happy – to set him up to be with Clarke.” Even as she said it, she could feel the knives of resentment in her voice and wished that she had disguised it better.

“No. It wasn't.” Raven looked thoughtful. “I don't feel guilty, because it wasn't my mess and it wasn't my job to clean it up. I just feel... sad. Sad for him. Sad for all of us. It was such a stupid waste of time. He was my family, and I loved him, and if I could have one thing in this universe to do over – out of all of the stupid, horrible things that have happened – it would be that. It would be to give the person I love more time with the person _he_ loved, because I could have. I could have given him that. Instead, I wasted it. We _all_ wasted it.

“So by the time I really let myself know, it was too late. He and Clarke were broken, and he and I were broken, and at the time, I was too young and too stupid – and too _angry –_ to know that we all still could have fixed it. You're right, it wasn't my job. But I still wish that I'd done it, because …” She threw her hands up in the air as though she'd run out of ways to explain it. “Because I love him. That's all. Just because I love him.”

There was a long pause, and Echo thought she was done. But she wasn't. “Don't wait, Echo. Be as pissed off as you want - at the universe for the way it all unfolded, at Bell for being too stupid to see what's right in front of his nose - but don't waste time the way we did. I know... I know what it's like to want things to be different.” For the first time, Raven sounded like she was speaking around a lump in her throat. “But they aren't.”

Neither woman looked back at the Rover, but they didn't need to, as Raven went on. “And – you don't need me to say this because, frankly, I think you're smarter than me about this – but don't blame Clarke. I wasted time on that, too, and then she was dead for six years, and I would have given anything to have that time back.

Echo felt angry, and she didn't know why. She felt like she was being backed into a corner. But she _had_ asked. So she focused on the only territory where she felt she still had a fighting chance.

“I'm sorry about how it turned out – that Finn died. But Bellamy isn't dying.” It felt like a lie.

Again, Raven looked behind them, where the little not-quite-family was huddled together as though bracing for assault. Echo realized that she should have asked Monty, or Harper, if she'd wanted someone to go easy on her. But she'd asked Raven, because Raven had been there. And Raven would tell the merciless truth.

When she turned back, the emotion of a moment ago was gone, and her voice was hard.

“That's bullshit, Echo. This is Earth. One way or another, we're all dying.”

****************

It was the second time in as many days that Clarke thought she was dead. Opening her eyes to find Bellamy and Madi inches away from her only compounded the issue – it could mean that she was alive, because they were both alive. Or, it could mean that she was dead, and her oxygen deprived brain had, in its final moments, been as generous as possible in its delusions.

She decided it would be easiest just to ask.

“Am I dead?” But her voice cracked around the dryness in her throat, and by the time Bellamy had sat her up and guided water to her lips, her head was swimming again.

“Not unless I end up killing you.” His voice was light and matter-of-fact, but he looked at her in a way that seemed to set her skin on fire.

“Bellamy says you saved him.” Madi's face was taut, her voice shaky, and suddenly it hit Clarke how much she had put the little girl through the last two days. “You gave him too much blood and that's why you were asleep like that.”

Clarke opened her arms and Madi, her shoulders still stiff with the effort of holding in tears, lay like a board across her chest. “He shouldn't have said that. It's not true.” She glared at Bellamy across the top of Madi's head, but it was hard to work up much indignation. If she was alive, it meant that he was alive. It had worked. It was hard to be angry when she was so fucking relieved. “I was never at any risk. It just took me a little longer than I expected to recover.” Bellamy raised his eyebrows at her across Madi's head, as if to say, _we'll talk later._ She had a feeling he had much more to say about her choice.

Well, let him talk as much as he wanted. As long as his stupid, misguided mouth was moving, it meant that his stupid, always-having-to-be-right lungs were filling with air. He could hate her forever, as far as she was concerned. She couldn't stop her heart from soaring, despite her best efforts to keep the glare in place on her face.

“That might be because you were already recovering from significant blood loss when you decided to subject yourself to _more_ blood loss.” Harper's voice had none of it's accustomed hesitancy. “Madi, honey, can you just skootch aside for a second? Bell, are you too weak to carry her? I want to get her to the ship. I could have John do it but...”

“I'll do it,” Bellamy said firmly, over Clarke's objections and Murphy's voice raised in protest.

“OK, I know that you all don't see me as a paragon of manhood, but I _think_ I could manage to not drop Clarke at _least_ as well as the dude who, apparently, was unconscious until about 10 minutes ago. Good move letting him drive the Rover, by the way. That was some clear thinking. I mean, you probably _still_ wouldn't have let _me_ drive the Rover, but Mr. Coma over there....”

John's monologue followed them to the ship. It was a brief walk, but Clarke had to admit that she would have struggled with it on her own. She let her head drop against Bellamy's shoulder and felt him, almost reflexively, lean his cheek on her hair. There had been a time, before everything had been so fraught between them, that she wouldn't have thought twice about resting in his arms. That was what they did, what they had _always_ done – carry each other when one of them was too weak to walk alone.

But now, as they approached the ship and she thought about Echo – who had gone ahead with Raven - she reluctantly lifted her head, even as it swam. She tried not to think too hard about why.

She glanced behind her, where Madi was walking silently beside John, clutching his hand so hard her knuckles were white. Clarke's heart hurt for her. She had tried so hard, after everything that had happened in the bunker, to make this brutal world feel safe for her. She wondered if the fear and worry of the last two days would erase all of the safety they had built up between them.

Octavia trailed behind Madi. Clarke was going to have to talk to her alone. She wanted to know what was going on in her brain – she wanted so badly to trust her, to believe that she really was back, but what if her ghosts came back? There wasn't enough Nightblood to save all of them if some voice in her head told Octavia, the warrior queen, decided that they needed to be entombed.

Maybe he could feel her craning her neck, or maybe, even after six years, he was still just too damn good at reading her mind. She felt him smile against her hair. “Hey.” It was _his_ voice again, not the angry, hollow echo of him that had set out in the Rover that morning. “You can't save the human race if you're dead, you know. Why don't you go to sleep and let me worry about them for a little while?”

Because there was no time to sleep. She had to reassure Madi, and figure out what the hell was going on with the ship – apparently they had learned _something,_ or they probably wouldn't be bringing her on board now – and, worst of all, she had to explain to the group about her mother's note and her decision to ….

Before she could finish the thought, before they had even stepped on board the ship, she was asleep.

****************

Madi felt turned inside out. Bellamy was … different. Different than in the pictures, different than in her head, different than he had been when they went out to get Octavia. She felt like, when she'd dreamed about him, it was more than just bringing him home – it was like she'd gone back with him to retrieve whatever piece of his soul he'd left up there, and now he was a person in a way he hadn't been a person before. Had she done that to him? That was a scary thought.

And he was holding Clarke like... like she was a fragile thing that needed so much care and attention. But Clarke _didn't._ She was fine, just sleeping. That's what John had said, and he'd said it in that serious way that meant that it wasn't a joke, the way half the things he said were.

She just wanted Bellamy to stop acting like she was going to die at any second. It was scaring her.

“Hey,” Harper spoke up behind her. “Don't worry, OK?”

“I'm _not._ ” It really annoyed her that Harper, of all people, thought that she was afraid.

“She's going to be fine now. Really. I just want to use some of the ship's supplies to rehydrate her, that kind of thing. She's out of the woods.”

Woods were groups of tall trees that had been alive for a long time. Like the green where they lived, but bigger. Madi knew what they looked like from pictures, and she knew Clarke hadn't been in any woods.

 _It's just an expression. Like how sometimes Clarke says “quick like a bunny” when she wants you to get into bed and forgets that you're not a baby anymore. Or how John tells the others to get off his back when they're not_ on _his back. It just means she's out of danger._ That was Monty, being patient and kind, but she didn't want patient and kind. She wanted true. When was Clarke in danger?

 _On the Rover. She almost died saving me, but she won't admit that to you._ If nothing else, she could always count on Bellamy for truth.

Why not?

_Because it proves she would choose me over you. She doesn't want you to know that._

His voice still wasn't mean. He was just telling her something that he thought she needed to know. It wasn't his fault that it made her want to curl up and whimper.

“But I need her.” She didn't realize she'd said it out loud until she saw Harper giving her an I-feel-sorry-for-you look. She didn't want Harper feeling sorry for her, but on the other hand, she was glad that it was Harper and not any of the others who had heard her. She didn't want Echo or Raven or John thinking that she wasn't brave enough to handle this.

“You're not going to lose her, honey. Honestly. She just needs rest, and she'll be good as new.”

 _Another expression. Anyway, don't worry. We're not going anywhere._ Echo, now.

Why not? You're here for real now. Why aren't you going away in my head?

 _We've always been here for real._ Her voice was fading, though, and Madi knew that meant they were going away for a little while. Sometimes she would go weeks without hearing from them. She hoped they stayed away for a little while, now. It was getting confusing, and besides – she would never tell them this – but she was starting to like the real versions of them. better. John was funnier in real life, and Echo was less cold. Raven was even smarter, Harper was a little less dumb, and Monty always smiled at her when she looked at him, a quiet little smile that just told her that he was happy that she was there. Even Emori was more interesting in real life. Madi was never sure what she was going to do next.

As for Bellamy... Bellamy was just different. She didn't know how, yet. But she thought she understood why he had always been looking away in all of the pictures that Clarke drew of him. Because the way he looked at Clarke in real life was... too much. It would have taken over the whole paper. It would have taken over _all_ of the papers, and maybe the whole world. Clarke had always said that she couldn't get his face right, but now Madi wasn't sure that was true. Maybe she hadn't _wanted_ to get his face right, because the look scared her, the way it scared Madi. It made her feel like there was a secret that she was being kept out of, and she and Clarke didn't keep secrets. It was a rule.

That was the problem with Earth-Bellamy. He broke all the rules that Madi had in her head, and every time she thought she'd figured out the new rules, he broke them again. Maybe that was why Clarke had tried to make him leave.

But he wasn't leaving. And somehow Madi knew that he wasn't going to, no matter what. Even if another Praimfaya happened – it was never going to be just her and Clarke again.

Murphy – Earth-Murphy – knelt in front of her and took her shoulder, gently. “Hey, kid. Don't cry. She's going to be OK, honest. Harper doesn't bullshit about stuff like that.”

He stood up and started to turn away, but she buried her face in his side. The tears were coming now, and she wasn't going to be able to stop them. He wrapped one arm around her and leaned over so that only she could hear him.

“That's OK. I shouldn't have told you not to cry. That's how kids get fucked up, trying not to cry. Go ahead and snot up my shirt. I'm not going anywhere.”

She decided that, if anyone other than Harper had to know she was scared, she didn't mind so much if it was Murphy.

****************

Echo didn't know what the hell was going on. They were on the ship, where one one seemed especially worried about life support or oxygen, though no one had deigned to tell her whether their project had been successful. There was a man in a radiation suit that no one seemed to be worried about, except for Emori, who was training a gun on him. He was ignoring that, and was instructing Bellamy to carry Clarke to the rear of the ship, saying that the medical supplies were back there. Harper was trailing along behind, and Raven was keeping pace, barking orders that everyone else seemed to be ignore, but which seemed to make her feeling better.

And Bellamy... well, Echo tried not to think about Bellamy cradling Clarke gently in his arms, her face turned into his neck, as though they were puzzle pieces that had finally been fitted together. _I knew before I knew. You know?_

Oh, shut up, Raven. No one asked you.

 _Except for you._ Now the voice in Echo's head was her own, and she was equally annoyed by it.

Well, when in doubt, grab a weapon and point it at someone.

She drew her sword and followed closely behind the group. Everyone else – except for Emori, whom Echo always found to be pretty sensible, when she wasn't talking about feelings – may have forgotten that they were surrounded by a ship full of sleeping threats, but that didn't mean Echo had to.

The group was crowded around a metallic table, like the kind in the medical bay on the ship. Echo had never understood why the little cots had to be metal, which seemed unnecessarily uncomfortable, but Harper had said it had to do with germs. Echo couldn't help but notice that Bellamy didn't seem too concerned about germs as he leaned in and whispered something into Clarke's ear.

“She's unconscious. She can't hear you.” Bellamy seemed un-bothered by Raven's criticism. He did, however, seem to recall that there were people other than him and Clarke in the room. He looked around for Echo.

“Hey. Everything OK out there?”

She nodded at him, once. She was startled by the easy warmth and intimacy of his manner toward her, as though nothing had changed. _He doesn't know that it has._

He came to stand beside her, his own hand resting easily on his gun, but not drawing it. She carried her sword by her side. “ _You_ OK?” He glanced down at the weapon.

“Fine.” His concern was worse than indifference. His face still lit up when he looked at her – it would have been so much easier if it didn't. “What _is_ all this?”

He shrugged. “I honestly don't know, but Raven doesn't seem that worried.”

“Emori does.”

“Emori's _always_ worried.”

“I guess.”

He looked at her and his eyes softened. “I'll figure it out, OK? Don't worry.”

“I'm not Clarke. You don't have to protect me.” She regretted it as soon as it left her mouth.

He frowned, confused. “I don't have to protect Clarke, either. What's your problem?”

“I don't know.” _Yes, I do._ “It's been a rough couple of days. Everyone keeps bleeding and passing out. It would be nice if we could just take a few minutes and rest our eyes.”

“I know.” He put his hand on the small of her back and it was all she could do not to lean into it. “We'll get Clarke settled and then we'll get Raven to fill us in. Then, you're right, we need to sleep. I'll take first watch and everyone else can rest.”

She wanted to argue with him, give him shit about always being the one to volunteer for the tough jobs, but she was so tired. They could argue later.

The man in the radiation suit, after a brief consultation with Harper, was removing his helmet. He leaned over Clarke with a needle, and she felt Bellamy tense. The hand that had been warming her back moved again to the gun at his side as he strode over. “What's going on?”

“Relax. I'm just giving her fluids.”

“What fluids?”

“Saline. Potassium. They used to call it a banana bag – I don't know what they call it now. If you still have them.”

What the hell was he talking about? Who was _they_?

Raven came to stand beside Echo. “I was only getting in the way. That's what Bellamy's for.” She stopped short, as though remembering that the subject of Bellamy's hyper-vigilance over Clarke was a touchy one.

“Raven, relax. I'm not going to have a meltdown just because you said his name.” _I hope._ “Are you going to fill us in on what's going on?”

Raven tilted her head. “I am. I'm just trying to think of the most efficient way to do it. OK, Bell,” she raised her voice, “leave Benjamin to it. He doesn't have some kind of ulterior motive here – besides, he knows that if anything happens to her on his watch, he'll have us to answer to.” She raised her voice. “Right, Ben?”

He sighed heavily. “Yeah, I got it.” Bell fixed him with an icy glare, and the man who was evidently named Benjamin looked at Raven. “Bellamy?” He asked, jerking his chin to indicate the man in question.

“How could you tell?” But Raven spoke drily, as thought she and the man already shared a private joke that Echo didn't understand. One more thing that had changed while she was looking the other way. “Come on, let's check on Madi – then I have to fill you in on some things.”

“Yeah,” Echo said. “There are things we need to tell you, too.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted in kind of a rush, so please let me know if you catch any errors! xo


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, guys! I try to post at least once a week but some of these scenes really didn't want to cooperate.  
> As usual, un-beta'd, so if you find a mistake let me know, and if something sounds awkward just assume that it WOULD have been brilliant with a little more attention.  
> xo

Raven rubbed her thumb across the page as though, in doing so, she could erase the letters. “Are you sure Abby wrote this?”

“ _I_ am.” Octavia spoke firmly, and for a moment seemed like her old self. “I remember now. I remember... a lot of things that I'd forgotten.” She didn't look at Madi, but the girl's hand snaked out and grasped hers. “It was bad in there – well, Clarke told you that already. But it's hard to explain _how_ bad it was. As soon as the doors closed... it was like everyone was watching everyone else, all the time. Just waiting for their chance. And when they found Madi and realized that a lot of the Grounders would follow a _Natblida_ in a heartbeat ...” She shrugged. “Things got ugly.”

“I don't understand.” Raven thought about the woman who had been willing to sacrifice everything – even her own daughter – for just the _chance_ of a livable earth. “Wouldn't Abby _want_ to get out? To keep fighting?”

“Not after they started to talk about a Culling.” The word sent chills down Raven's spine. “I don't know if they went through with it, but they were already planning it when they got rid of me. I think, after that, Abby just... gave up. She asked them if she could say goodbye to me, and they let her.” Octavia's voice wobbled, then regained its composure. “That was when she gave me the note. She said that if I found anyone out here, I should give it to them. I wasn't really... all _there_ at that point, but she repeated it until I understood. So when Clarke found me...”

“You gave her the note.” Raven spoke dully. It was hard to imagine Abby giving up.

Octavia seemed to read her mind. “I think, in the end, it was the only way she knew to fight back. She tried to keep things from going the way they did... we all tried. Maybe she thought that the only way to save the world up here was to protect it from what was happening down there.” Octavia's voice gained assurance as her memory seemed to clear. “She never gave up hope that Clarke – that _all_ of you – made it. That you were coming back.” She shrugged. “It was the only thing she could think to do, to try to make it safe for when you did.”

“So what do we do now?” Harper seemed disquieted. “Just leave them down there?”

“Just because Abby wrote it doesn't mean we have to do it.” Monty spoke firmly. “There are innocent people down there. Maybe Abby gave up, but that doesn't mean we have to.”

Harper was shaking her head. “But we have no way of knowing how many there are of … I don't know, the bad ones.”

“You mean how many Azgeda.” Echo spoke flatly.

“ _No._ I really don't. We have no idea which faction is in control now. If things were bad enough for Abby to write that note, we can't trust anything – or anyone – that we think we know. For all we know, someone like Indra could have turned, and we'd have no idea until she was cutting our throats.”

Octavia stiffened. “Indra was imprisoned because she tried to help me. She's not one of them.”

“Fine, but you see what I mean.”

“We've already had this conversation.” Emori spoke up from the corner where she was slouching, holding her gun at her side.

“What?” Harper frowned at her.

“About the ship.” She straightened up and gestured around her. “It's the same thing. Don't you think it's getting a bit repetitive? We don't know who's dangerous and who's safe; we don't know how many innocent people might die if we do nothing; we don't know how many of _us_ might die if we do something. We made our decision with the ship. How is this any different?”

“I thought you didn't _want_ to help the ship.” Echo's voice was chilly.

“I didn't. But I was outvoted.” She shrugged. “Just like when we decided to come down here. Staying safe doesn't seem to be the popular choice, so why don't we cut to the chase and just admit to ourselves that we're going to be reckless, fix the radiation monitors, and hope for the best?”

There was a long silence. John broke it.

“Emori's right. We did already make this decision. But...” He glanced apologetically at Emori. “You're wrong about the rest of it. I don't think we're being reckless. It's _not_ reckless to recognize that we're better off with more people up here. We don't have a great track record with small groups trying to go it alone. It's how Jaha and I almost ended up dying in the desert.” He shrugged. “I'm not happy about it. But we don't have a choice, do we? We can't keep a thousand people underground just because we don't know what's going to happen when they get up here. We _never_ know what's going to happen. Look at me, Echo and Emori. You guys had no way of predicting what would happen when you brought us up to the Ring, but you brought us anyway. You decided to trust us - not because we deserved it, but because there was no other choice. We trust each other because the alternative is dying alone.”

It was, Raven thought, the most uncharacteristic thing he could have said. As if reading her mind, he gave her small, wry smile.

“Don't worry, I haven't suddenly grown a heart. I just think this is the smart play - the _survivor's_ play. Clarke and the kid may have managed out here without help for six years, but I don't think _we_ can. Not indefinitely. And now we've got this whole... situation,” he gestured around the ship. “We need Dr. Griffin to help with these people. We need Kane to help us figure out what to do next. It's like when we all cut off our bracelets in those first few days - it was basically suicide. Yeah, we were afraid of what would happen if the Ark came down, but we should have been more afraid of what would happen if it _didn't._ Clarke got that, and we should have listened to her. Maybe those people in section 17 would still be alive if we had.”

“OK, but Clarke clearly feels differently now.” Harper looked to Bellamy, then to Raven, maybe hoping that someone would take charge and make the decision for her. “And I don't want to do anything without talking to her first. I don't want us to be all... split up again.” Raven understood what she meant. If they were asking for a fight, she needed to at least know they were fighting for the same side.

Bellamy, silent until now, got to his feet. “I'll talk to her. She'll come around.”

Just as quickly, Monty stood up and gestured for Bellamy to sit back down. “No. I will.”

Monty's tone brooked no argument. Bellamy stood, still half-sitting and half-standing, a look of uncertainty on his face, as Monty headed decisively for the rear of the ship.

****************

It was surprising how isolated the Med Bay felt, for such a small ship. They were barely 30 feet from the others, but separated from them by several rows of suspended animation pods. Monty had noticed before how little sound carried - he knew they would have privacy.

Clarke stirred and, eyes fluttering, startled from unconsciousness into immediate vigilance. It brought a lump to his throat. The rest of them had at least had the respite waking to safety during the past six years. What had they left her to?

She found his face, and relaxed. He smiled down at her.

“Hey. Good to see you alive.”

“Thanks.” She spoke thickly, and sipped the water that he held to her lips before continuing. “Good to be back.”

She closed her eyes again, and he thought that she was going to doze off, but then she spoke, her voice weary. “You want to talk about the bunker.”

A part of him wanted to deny it, to put the conversation off for another time; she looked so tired. But they didn't have that kind of time. They never had.

Where should he begin? With everything there hadn't been time to say six years ago? Or the things he needed her to know _now,_ so that she wouldn't keep making the same mistakes, over and over again? Those mistakes were wearing her into a ghost of herself, and he had already lived with her ghost for too long.

What the hell? Might as well start from the beginning.

“You're my oldest friend, you know.” At her look of confusion, he clarified. “Living friend, I mean. There aren't that many of us left from the original hundred, and even fewer of us left from that first day. The hike to Mount Weather.”

“I knew what you meant.” Her face was unreadable.

“Finn could have grabbed anyone that day to go with you guys, but he grabbed me and Jasper. From then on it was like... we belonged to you. To your team – yours and Finn's. And now there's no one left on the team but me and you.”

“And Octavia.”

“Her, too.” He looked down, briefly, then back up, deciding to be honest. “But she's not – _her –_ anymore. Not really.” When Clarke opened her mouth to speak, he went on in a rush. “I don't mean that she's not still in there. But if I were to go out there right now and try to talk to her about Jasper, about Finn – about that day – would she even know what I was talking about?”

Clarke looked away.

“ _You_ do. You carry it with you. So do I.” How could he explain what he was trying to say? That Clarke held the piece of him that had set out on that terrible, wonderful day, afraid and hopeful in equal measure. That she was the _Fleimkepa_ of his innocence, and he of hers. That in their graves, Finn and Jasper, too, lay buried with the memory of the pure, wild, triumph of the moment Jasper landed on the other side of that river, brave and strong and clean in a new world that had not yet broken any of them.

“Remember when Jasper crossed the river?” He knew, to her, his line of thought must seem random and disorienting. _Follow me_ , he willed her. _Follow me like I've always followed you._ “Not the part about the spear. Before that. Do remember the moment he landed? When we thought that we'd won?”

A small smile dawned on her lips. “Of course.”

“We were _wild._ ”

She closed her eyes, and he wondered whether she was reliving, or warding off, the memory. “We thought we had made it. Then....”

“Before that, though.” _Stay with me._ “Finn was going to go first, remember? And then Jasper -”

“He wanted to impress Octavia.” She was grinning, now. “It worked, too.”

“That was the thing about that day – that whole trip. It was back when we had room for things like that. Showing off. Stepping aside for your buddy to impress a pretty girl. Stuff from our old lives.” He paused. “Being kind. Finn was being kind.”

The grin faded from her face, and she looked at him like he had trapped her. “Yeah. Finn was kind, and Jasper got speared. That's the thing about kindness – you start out with good intentions, and then people start getting hurt.”

He sighed. There it was – that feeling that he always had towards her, the highly specific  _Clarke_ feeling; a combination of fierce loyalty, deep frustration, a touch of awe, and, occasionally, a shadow of trepidation, as though he was walking on a frozen river and never quite knew how thick the ice beneath his feet was.

And, of course, gratitude. He wondered if he would ever again be able to fully separate his feelings for the flesh-and-blood Clarke from those for the savior who had sacrificed herself so that he could live. It was a spooky thing, wanting to worship and throttle her at the same time.

“But in that moment, we believed we could win. We _knew_ we could. Remember? Even after Jasper was speared, _you_ were the one who didn't give up on him. You were the reason he survived. You believed we could win, and because of that, we did. _He_ did.”

“He _didn't_ , though. I risked everything – everyone who went to search for him, and for the algae to save him. The morale of the kids who had to sit around and listen to him suffer. I risked all of that, and he _still_ didn't make it.”

“He made it long enough to fire the gun at the bridge that day – to become a hero. To eat chocolate cake. To fall in love. Who the hell are you to say that that wasn't worth it? That because he died in the end, it doesn't matter that you fought for him in the beginning? We _all_ die. Does that mean none of us are worth fighting for?” His voice was shaking. “Jasper got hurt – in more ways than one. And Finn lost himself – everything except for his love for you. Does that mean we should never have fought for them at all? That their lives weren't worth anything?

“I'm telling you, Clarke, that moment – the moment when Jasper landed on the bank, the moment _we won_ – it's at the heart of every good thing we've done since. Every good, pure – and yeah, sometimes doomed – thing _any of us_ have done. We've done it because somewhere in us, we remember what it's like to win. And we _know_ we can win again." He swallowed, hard. “It's why we're going to keep fighting. Why we're going fix those sensors, and bring our people up to the surface.”

She sagged, as if in relief that he had finally said it. “I don't even know if I _can_ fix them. Sometimes when you break something, it stays broken. You know that better than anyone.”

“We can try, at least. And if we can't, we need to find another way to signal to them that it's safe up here.”

“It might _not_ be safe up here for long, if we let them come up. Why should we risk it?”

“Because we _would_ have.” If he couldn't make her understand this, then he had failed her. "Back then."

She turned away. “Echo showed you my mother's note.”

“Yes.”

“And you still think we should... unleash them.”

“The remaining members of the human race? Hell, yes. And you do, too. You're just afraid.”

“Can't you understand why?”

He didn't answer right away, letting the question hang between them before speaking. “ _I_ was scared, when the Grounders got Jasper on that first day. Actually, I was scared long before that. You didn't seem to be.”

“Of course I was.”

“I know that now. But back then, I honestly thought that you weren't. You and Finn just seemed to... I don't know, _belong_ here. Like you were born on Earth.”

“He was the tracker. I didn't know what I was-”

“Yes, you did. You knew what you were doing. You were _leading_ us. From the very first day.” She shook her head, but he didn't let it go. “Want to know why I followed you, and not Bellamy? Why I joined your team? Back then, he was only fighting for himself and Octavia. I know it's different now. But even then - from the very beginning - you were fighting for _all_ of us. You fought for Jasper when it would have been so easy – sensible, even – to give up on him. You didn't calculate the cost. You just fought, with everything you had, for _every single life_.”

“I was naïve.”

“You _saved_ us.” He spoke fervently. “I don't mean that you kept us alive –“

“Because I didn't.”

“Shut up and _listen,_ Clarke. You may not have kept us all alive – no one could have done that. What you did was keep us _human._ All of us, whether we deserved it or not. The day that you made Bellamy come with you to save Jasper – you saved Bellamy's fucking _soul._ You saved _all_ of our souls. You fought like we were worth it – like _humanity_ was worth it. If you hadn't, do you really think _we_ would have fought so hard, even when it was so hard and hurt so much? Do you really think we would still be here?”

Again, she turned away. “You're making me sound... that's not how it was. I did other things, too. I pulled the lever at Mount Weather. I made that list - remember? You sure as hell didn't think I was any kind of hero then.”

He was glad she'd said it. He'd known that it had to come up at one point – it was, in its way, as much a turning point in their friendship as that first day had been. Still, he wasn't quite sure what to say next – that he forgave her? That wouldn't be quite true. In a way, he would never forgive her – for keeping it secret. For leaving Harper off the damn thing. For the rage that it had triggered, driving him to expose her so cruelly.

And at the same time, he had always known that there was nothing to forgive.

“I don't think there was ever time for me to tell you about the last time I saw Jasper.” He wasn't sure where it came from, but suddenly it was the only thing that made sense to talk about.

She looked up, startled, but he didn't stop. If he did he might lose his nerve.

“I had a couple of minutes with him, before … well. A few minutes when we both knew what he had done; what was coming. Know what he said? He told me to tell him I loved him.” He wished, more than anything, that he didn't still feel so _angry._ “Of course I loved him. _Love_ him. But I also fucking _hated_ him. In that moment, I swear to god, I could have killed him myself – isn't that stupid? I could have killed him for killing himself.” He laughed bitterly. “We had all lost so much, and he was acting like he was the only one who ... I guess I haven't forgiven him, not really. I needed him, and he left me.” He shrugged. “But I had one last chance to tell him – my _best friend_ – that I loved him. He said it to me. And he warned me that I would regret it if I didn't.

“I do regret it. I mean, I said it in the end, but it was too late. He never heard it. That was the choice _I_ made. So don't think I don't understand what it's like – to make a choice like that. A choice that chips away a piece of your soul, and you don't even know until it's over. Until it's too late to ever get it back.”

He didn't realize he was crying until she reached out and took his hand.

“So you made a fucking list. You did what you would never have done on that first day.” He had never told anyone about those last few moments with Jasper – not even Harper. “And I was _so_ angry with you. I said that it was because you lied, but looking back, I think I was just scared. I needed you to be the person you were when we'd landed, the person who would have refused to weigh one life against another.”

She closed her eyes and was silent for so long that he worried that he'd pushed to her too hard, that the conversation was over. When she finally spoke, her voice was heavy.

“I didn't put you on the list. I was going to leave you behind.” The corners of her mouth turned up; something between a smile and a grimace. “My oldest living friend.”

“So what? Who am I to disagree with that choice? No one has ever asked _me_ to make a list like that. No one ever would. That's the difference between me and you – no matter how much you do, people will always demand more. And I stood by and watched, and when it got to be too much to bear, I turned on you. I left you to bear it alone.”

“Not alone.”

“No,” Monty acknowledged. “You had Bellamy. He was stronger than me - too strong to turn on you. Thank god for that - that you didn't have to be the one to write the last name. He was right, by the way. We still needed you. We still _need_ you. I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do about that. But I _can_ make sure you don't have bear it alone this time. And that neither one of us makes a choice now that chips away another piece of our souls - they don't have many pieces left to lose." He crouched down so that his head was level with hers. “There are Jaspers, and Octavias, and Finns down in that bunker. If we don't fight for them, then _we_ aren't worth fighting for. And I'm _going_ to fight for us. More than that; I'm going to _win,_ because you taught me how.

“I don't care if they come out of that bunker declaring war. I don't care if they bring down another Praimfaya - we are going to _win_. We are _not_ leaving anyone behind, ever again.” His hand was still in hers, a single point of warmth between them. “No more lists.”

She spoke so quietly, he might have missed it, if he hadn't known it was coming.

"No more lists."

A few minutes later, he returned to the group. In silence, they turned to him like clockwork figures, awaiting his delivery of Clarke's mandate. It was funny, he thought. All of the votes they had taken over the years, and all it had taken was a couple of days back on the Ground for their future to hang once more on her word.

Only Bellamy remained frozen, his eyes on the ground in front of him. Monty wondered whether it was because he already knew what she had said, or because he couldn't bear not knowing.

“We're bringing them up.”

****************

It was two days before Clarke was well enough to leave the ship, and no one pushed to start looking for the monitors before then, though both Madi and Monty knew where they were. Clarke wasn't the only one who needed rest, and no one seemed to be in a hurry. Maybe, Bellamy thought, they were all feeling a bit uneasy about what unleashing Wonkru might mean.

On the first morning, as everyone else dispersed – Raven and Emori to run diagnostics on the ship's life support system, Monty, Harper, John and Madi to check the traps for meat, and Octavia to wherever Octavia went when she wasn't haunting the fringes of the camp – Echo crouched beside him at the fire and, without speaking, nodded at the trees. He got up and followed her, setting off on a loop that encompassed the camp, the _Princess_ landing site, and the beginning of the Waste to the east _._

Their shared silence and the rhythm of their gait as they fell into step lulled them into a comfortable silence, but after a few minutes, she broke it. “I feel like we're waiting for the other foot to drop.”

“Shoe.” He corrected her absentmindedly. “The other shoe.”

"Why would a shoe drop?"

"I don't know. Why would a foot?"

“Whatever. It's a stupid expression. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. It feels like trouble is coming.” He held out his hand to pause her, and scanned the path ahead. A bird startled out of the brush, sending his heart into this throat and explaining the murmur of noise that he hadn't fully processed before his muscles had responded. He thought about going for his gun and shooting the game, but it was a small thing, either young or underfed. Not worth the ammunition.

“Yes. Why?” She watched the bird take off into the distance.

“I don't know. I feel it too. It's like it's...” he couldn't bring himself to say it.

“Too quiet.” The cliched phrase sounded simple and true, coming from her. He couldn't have pulled it off without sounding like he was trying to imitate one of the heroes Murphy's old westerns. It wasn't a role that suited him.

“Yeah. But it should be, right? Quiet?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. I don't know what quiet is supposed to be like. For as long as I can remember, I was fighting. First training; then guarding the queen, then Roan; then Praimfaya. The closest I've ever come to quiet was the Ring. That was OK, but _this_ quiet feels wrong. ”

As she spoke, Bellamy found himself trying to picture the life that she was describing. It wasn't the first time he'd tried to imagine Echo before he had known her – before she had become the warrior who was always either fighting against him or by his side – and couldn't. It was as though she had never grown into herself, but instead had arrived in the world fully formed.

It was the way he felt about Clarke, too. He had tried many times – especially on the Ring, living among the skeletons of their past lives – to imagine her life the way she had alluded to it. TV nights with Wells and the Chancellor; dinner table conversations about how she was doing in school, and how she needed to buckle down if she had a shot at following her mother onto the council someday or, better, to the Chancellorship. Drawing the earth as it was in her mind – the night sky from below, the breathing green of a forest. He had tried, over and over, to understand that all of those long nights when he had whispered stories to Octavia, careful to not wake up their exhausted mother, Clarke had been out there somewhere – wondering or worrying, making the tiny choices and navigating the daily storms that, over the years, would weather her into the person with whom he had clashed on the Dropship.

But he couldn't. He couldn't imagine either Clarke or Echo ever being anything other than fiercely, utterly themselves.

He, on the other hand, felt like he was always in flux, always shapeshifting, each new version of himself ready to be blown away and formed anew by the next gust of wind. Odd how different from him they were, these women who he...

The thought was gone before he could finish it. For a moment he tried to follow it, but a knot in his stomach told him that it was better not to. Some ideas were better left incomplete.

****************

“You really did a number on them.” Monty sounded pissed, but Clarke felt surprisingly calm. As the person who had personally smashed the sensors to pieces, she had known all along that they were going to have to find another way to reach Wonkru. Besides, it was satisfying to know she'd done a thorough job.

“Yeah, well, we didn't know what we were doing. So we had to go with blunt force.” The sensor lay crumpled on the ground, where Clarke and Madi had left it the previous year, when the radiation started to drop and they knew they had run out of time to delay the inevitable.

“Do you even know how long it took me to put these together out of the crap we had at Arkadia? Days. I mean, I could have improved the design for the aquafarm, or spent more time troubleshooting the algae dehydrator, but as I recall, _someone_ insisted that this was the most important task I could possibly undertake.”

Clarke shrugged, indifferently. “Well, at the time, it was. I didn't want us to survive for five years only to wander into a radiation storm at the end of it.” She could feel him glaring at her, but she ignored it. It was coming back to her now, how _moody_ he and Raven could get about their creations. “Can you fix it or not?”

“Definitely  _not._ I mean, not without equipment we don't have.”

“So we'll find another way.” She spoke with assurance, and it wasn't just for his sake. She felt like Monty had woken her from a long sleep. She wasn't going to rest until they had brought their people up to the surface.

“Maybe the others are having more luck.” Monty, unlike her, spoke without hope. He, Bellamy and Clarke had taken the Rover to check on the monitors closest to the bunker entrance. Raven, Murphy, and Madi, after dropping Clarke's group off by the bunker, had taken the swath of Waste between the bunker and the area around camp. The others had followed a map to identify the few sensors that were reachable by foot from the ship. The idea was that each group would have someone – Monty, Raven, or Emori – who would know how to handle the sensors.

“Maybe.” Clarke spoke more to fill the silence than because she thought that it was likely. She knew what the other groups would find – each of the dozen or so sensors would be just as worthless as the one that lay crushed before her in the red sand. It didn't matter. For three days, she had already been thinking of alternatives.

She glanced at Bellamy, who was standing at a distance, on guard, though there were no evident threats. Habit, she supposed. He met her gaze and nodded, wordlessly acknowledging the reality of their situation.

“The radio? Maybe now that we're closer...” He spoke as though resuming a conversation they had just paused.

“Won't work. We can try again, but I'm telling you, I tried a _lot_ in that first year. Whatever damage the death wave did to their equipment was permanent. _My_ radio definitely works.” _I know because I test – tested – it every day._ “But having a way to broadcast won't do any good if they can't receive it.”

She knew what he'd suggest next. “Fine. We walk up to the front door and use the heaviest thing we can find to knock on it. See if they'll open up.”

She was already shaking her head. She'd already considered that, too. “Even if they _did_ hear us – do you remember how thick that hatchway is? – they still think it's radioactive out here. Plus, they might thing someone is attacking and open fire. We need a way to breach the bunker without making any noise, and without drawing any attention to ourselves. Then we can send someone in to find my mom, or Kane – assuming they're still alive – and deliver the message. Figure it out from there.”

“So we just need to find a back door to a bunker that was designed to withstand all physical, chemical, and natural forces for a thousand years."

"An _unlocked_ back door." She grinned.

"Right. Shouldn't be too hard. Then we sneak in our inside man. Like Mount Weather.” Clearly, Bellamy was already assuming he would be the one to go. They could argue about it later.

“What if your mom still thinks they deserve to rot down there?”

Clarke had anticipated Monty's question, but that didn't mean she had a good answer. She shrugged; one thing at a time. “Then we find someone else. It's not her call.” She stood and turned away from the broken sensor, heading back to the Rover. “Whatever it takes, right?”

Bellamy fell into step beside her, shielding her from the desert wind. “Whatever it takes.”

****************

Raven shook her head. “The whole point of the bunker is that there _is_ no way to get in.”

“We got into Mount Weather.” Too late, Bellamy remembered that Benjamin had joined them for this discussion, looking like an overgrown mushroom in his radiation suit. Bellamy still didn't totally understand how a man from a hundred years ago had found his way to their campfire, but he was pretty sure that it wasn't smart to let him in on all of their secrets - at least, not the ones involving genocide.

“Wait. You've been _inside_ Mount Weather?" To Bellamy's chagrin, Benjamin had been paying attention. "How? When?”

Raven was already shaking her head. “Ben, we'll fill you in later. Bell, that was different. You found a way to use their own supply line against them. The Wonkru bunker doesn't _have_ a supply line. There's nothing to use – no contact at all with the outside world. That was the whole idea.”

 _No contact with the outside world_. The idea seemed to arise from nowhere, fully formed. What if their inside man didn't have to actually get inside?

He turned to Madi. "Can you do it?”

Clarke put her hand on the younger girl's arm. “Bell, we're not sending Madi in, even if we _could_ find a way. That's insane.”

Bellamy didn't break eye contact with the girl. “Clarke doesn't know?” _Shit._

“Clarke doesn't know what? Mads, what is he talking about?”

Madi was shaking her head. “It doesn't work that way.”

“ _What_ doesn't work that way? What way? Madi, _what is he talking about?_ ” Too late, Bellamy realized that he should have pulled the girl aside to talk. But it hadn't occurred to him that she would keep something like this a secret from Clarke. He didn't quite know what "this" was, but he knew it was big and confusing and probably something a kid would need to talk about.

Madi turned to Clarke. “I don't know. I don't know how to explain it.”

“Explain _what?”_ Now Clarke turned on Bellamy. “Tell me what you are talking about _right the hell now._ ”

“ _I_ don't know how to explain it. I don't even know what 'it' is, really. Just that... well, I think Madi can kind of... get places. Like, places her body doesn't go." He realized he sounded confused and a little crazy - he _was_ confused, and the whole situation was crazy - but he was growing more certain by the second.

He hadn't really remembered the dream until, standing outside the Rover with Clarke unconscious inside, Madi had asked him if Clarke was in the Underworld. That hadn't been so strange - he would have assumed it was just her weird way of asking if Clarke was dead. Madi was a weird kid.

But then she had said that she _couldn't follow_ her there. It hadn't made sense until, all of a sudden, he remembered the dream, and realized that Madi _had_ followed _him_ \- to his own personal Underworld. He had been lost somewhere in his mind, and she had come to bring him home. It might have just been a dream, except that looking at her in that moment, he was sure that she remembered it, too.

“I didn't mean to.” Madi spoke quietly, her eyes now on the ground. Oh, good. Now she thought she was in trouble.

“Mads? It's OK." Clarke was clearly trying to be gentle, but the edge in her tone reminded Bellamy of his own mother's when he and Octavia got too rowdy. "I just need to know what you're talking about. Can you tell me?”

"Look, Madi, can you tell them, please? Otherwise they're going to think that I'm completely crazy." He smiled tentatively at her, and to his surprise, she gave him a small smile in return.

“It's just... something that happened. I was sleeping, and then I was with Bellamy on the Ark. Not the Ring. Some other place.”

“The viewing deck on Alpha station.”

“OK.” She shrugged, the words obviously meaning nothing to her. So how had she known that they weren't on the Ring?

“Mads, how did you know it wasn't the Ring?” Clarke voiced his unspoken question.

She looked at Clarke, puzzled, as though the answer was obvious. “Because the Ring looks different.”

“Yes, but how do you know what the Ring looks like?”

“Oh. Because I used to dream about it. I don't anymore, not since they landed.”

Bellamy exchanged a quick glance with Clarke, and they silently agreed to let it go for the time being.

“OK. So you were on the Ark with Bellamy. Then what happened?”

“He was acting... weird. Like, he couldn't remember things. He thought he was a janitor, and he didn't know who anyone was. He thought he still lived there.”

Yes. He had known, somewhere in the back of his head, about Earth and the others. But he hadn't been able to reach the knowledge.

“So I … helped him. I knew he had to get to the launchpad, so I brought him there.”

“But how did you know? That that was where I needed to be?” 

“Because... I just did.” She looked frustrated. “I don't _know_ how I knew. I just knew that it was where you had to be. And I knew how to take you there. And I knew I couldn't look back.”

“Like in the story.”

She shrugged. “They were your rules.”

Clarke interrupted impatiently. “Wait, Bellamy, how do you know all of this? If this was Madi's dream...”

“It wasn't. It was _my_ dream. That's what she means when she says they were my rules. The part about her not being able to look back at me, and knowing that I had to get to...” He just stopped himself from saying _The Princess._ “The launchpad. I don't think it _was_ a dream, though. Not really. Right, Madi?” He swallowed, knowing that what he was about to say sounded a little melodramatic. “I think... I'm pretty sure.... I was dying. Maybe even dead. I was lost up there – I would have just stared out that window forever. I felt so tired, and so heavy. But Madi got me to the launchpad, and...” he shrugged, uncomfortably. “I remembered. Everything. Including the fact that I had to come home. It was like she was my anchor, somehow. My connection to you.” He corrected himself, quickly. _“_ To _all_ of you. _”_

“So you're saying that Madi somehow visited you in your dream – vision, whatever – and brought you back to life? Bell, that's _insane._ ” She had her hand protectively on Madi's arm, as though Bellamy was trying to physically pull the girl away from her. _I wouldn't do that,_ he thought. _I would never take anything that you needed so much._

“Is it?” Now Raven spoke. “She's taken the Flame, right? Let's be honest - it's not like we really understand how the Flame works. We _do_ know that it connects you to other consciousnesses. Maybe that's what happened with Madi and Bell.”

Clarke shook her head emphatically. “But the Flame didn't work on her. She was just alone in a cold, small, dark place. There were no ancestors. There was no one.” Clarke's eyes filled with tears, and part of Bellamy wanted to stop all of this, to preserve the idea that the only thing miraculous about Madi was the way Clarke had found her, at the end of the world, when she needed her most. “Besides, the Flame only connects you to people who are uploaded onto it. Bellamy isn't.”

“No, that's true.” Raven looked thoughtful. “But again, we don't really understand how the tech  _works._ I mean, we thought we understood ALIE and her chips, and then for some reason it caused me and your mom to both have visions of the future - accurate visions. How is that possible?”

“I don't know, but –“

“Exactly. We _don't_ know."

Bellamy was thinking about Lexa, guiding Clarke through the City of Light – surely she was more than a digital imprint. Hadn't there been some _real_ piece of her, capable of free thought, of _love_ , that had been in there too? "The Flame seems to preserve people beyond the data that's been uploaded. You know? Their _souls_.”

“So, what, you're saying that Becca figured out how to catch ghosts and stick them in people's heads?” Murphy sounded skeptical.

“No. Maybe. I don't know. What I'm saying is that maybe what the Flame does has less to do with the data that's on it, and more to do with what it does to the brain of the person who took it. Making it....more receptive, somehow." He gestured helplessly at Raven, wishing he'd paid more attention in any of his science classes. Literature had really been more his speed.

"Receptive to energy," she offered. "Or electromagnetic waves, or _something_. Even things that weren't uploaded onto the Flame in the first place.” She wasn't do much better with it than he had.

“That doesn't make any sense.” Monty sounded like he was trying to let Raven down gently.

“That's because I'm not smart enough to understand it anymore!” Raven's cry was pure frustration. “I _was_ when I had Becca, but I don't anymore, so I can't explain it any better than you can.”

“Hey.” Bellamy reached out to cover her hand with his, but Clarke beat him to it, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Raven shrugged it off irritably and glared around the circle, but something in her expression had eased as she went on.

“What would be really, _unforgivably_ stupid would be for us to think we _do_ understand how the Flame works. Becca was the most brilliant scientist alive during a time when technology had advanced farther than ever before, or since – and her _specialty_ was neuroscience. She knew things about the human brain that will never be known again, not even if humans manage to survive another thousand years. How can we be sure that she didn't design the Flame to... improve the human brain? Give it capabilities that it doesn't have naturally? Doesn't that _sound_ like something she would dream up?”

“OK, so you're telling me that maybe – _maybe –_ Madi can read minds, or whatever.” Clarke frowned. “If that's true, why am I only finding out about it now?”

How could Bellamy explain the wordless understanding he had shared with Madi after he woke up? He assumed that Clarke already _knew,_ and it felt too crazy to name out loud. “I just thought...”

“Not you.” Clarke turned to Madi, and made another obvious effort to soften her voice. “Honey, why didn't you ever say anything about this before? Have you ever entered _my_ dreams?”

“I told you, it doesn't work that way.” Madi looked upset. “I can't just do it to anyone. Besides, I didn't say anything because I didn't think that it was _real._ I just … dreamed about people. How was I supposed to know that they were dreaming the same thing?”

“That's how you knew what the Ring looked like. You dreamed about us up there.” Raven's face lit up with excitement. “Madi. Do you think that you can share dreams, too? Or... put things in other people's dreams? Like, Bellamy said that all the stuff from his dream came from him. But are there ever times that you put stuff from _you_ into other people's dreams? What you're seeing... or hearing?” Bellamy couldn't figure out why Raven sounded so urgent, or why Madi was avoiding her gaze. “You can, can't you? That's how we dreamed about Clarke making....” Raven glanced at Bellamy and cut herself off. “About Clarke. Down here.”

It took Bellamy a second to catch up with what she was saying, but when he did, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. “Hold on. You're saying that the dreams...” He thought back to everything he'd dreamed - the things Clarke had said to him; all of the times he'd woken up crying. If all those times had been real.... He shook his head. “Not possible.”

“Maybe not all of them. But some of them must have been.”

Clarke looked panicky. “Madi, have you been sending them messages? In your sleep? I don't understand. Why?” Bellamy could tell that she was trying hard to keep the accusation out of her voice, but it was sneaking in. He didn't blame her. She must be feeling exposed. He wouldn't have wanted to think that Clarke had been able to secretly watch him, all those years on the Ring. When he was up there, he hadn't felt like he had anything to hide. But now that they were together again in real life... there was such a thing as too much honesty.

“I didn't _mean_ to...” The whine had emerged in Madi's voice. “It just _happened.”_

Clarke frowned at her. “Mads... it's not true that you didn't know that it was happening, is it?”

Madi looked down, and Bellamy saw the flush creep up her neck.

“No.”

“Madi, what do we say about lying?”

Bellamy felt for her, but he wasn't about to get in Clarke's line of fire. Luckily for Madi, she had Murphy to speak up for her. “Leave the kid alone. What would you have said, if she'd told you three years ago, that she was … what, beaming shit into our dreams? Connecting with us telepathically? What would you have thought?”

Clarke glared at him, then took a deep breath, obviously willing herself to have patience, and spoke through gritted teeth. “I would have thought that it was her imagination. I would have told her to stop...” The glare faded as realization dawned. “I would have told her to stop telling lies.” She looked at Madi, who was still staring at her feet. “Honey, I'm sorry. That's why you didn't say anything, isn't it? You knew I wouldn't believe you.”

Madi shrugged. “That was part of it. The other part was....” She looked back and forth from Clarke to Bellamy, as if unsure of what she was allowed to say. “I thought it would hurt you too much. You know, that I could see... them. And you couldn't.”

“Where _did_ you see us?” Bellamy had a sudden vision of Madi hovering over his bed. The bed that he shared with Echo. Oh, God. Did she only watch them while they were asleep, or did she watch.. other times, too? _Please no..._

But Madi looked back at him with wide, innocent eyes. “In the Underworld.”

“What does that _mean?_ ” Clarke no longer sounded angry, just weary.

“I didn't know what it was called until he told me.” She nodded at Bellamy. “It's the Underworld. It's not Earth, and it's not Space. It's the place where ghosts live.”

“Madi, that was just a story.” Bellamy tried to broadcast silent apologies to Clarke. _I'll never tell her another bedtime story, I swear. I'll leave it up to Murphy from now on..._ “There is no real Underworld.”

“Then where did I find you?” The question was simple, but it trapped him. He had no answer.

“I've been there too.” Octavia, who had been watching silently up until now, finally spoke. “It's where... where you go when they put the Flame in you.” Her breath quickened, her nostrils flaring like those of a frightened animal. “It's dark, and empty, and... really, really lonely. It's where the commanders are supposed to find you, but when they don't...” She stopped, as though the rest was self-evident.

It wasn't. Bellamy _needed_ to know what had happened to his sister during her time in the bunker. The first time in his life he had left her side, she had suffered something so horrible, she couldn't talk about it. He couldn't go back to rescue her from it now, but he could go back with her in her mind and witness. Make it so that she didn't have to bear the memories alone.

But that would have to wait. For now, he felt like a dog on a scent that he kept finding and then losing again. Madi could enter their dreams, and somehow... broadcast into them. She did it by going into the place where the Flame had sent her to wait for the commanders, but where she had been left alone. Octavia had gone to the same place.

“So you can do it, too?” How come she hadn't found him, all those years? How come she hadn't come looking for him?

“No.” Octavia looked ashamed. “At least... not with living people.”

That was a thought that was best left unexplored for now.

Clarke threw up her hands in frustration. “I give up. She can enter dreams, but not all dreams. She can … what, read people's mind?”

“That's how you knew where the panel on the ship was, after I'd seen it. Even though I never told you about it.” Raven sounded like she was thinking out loud. Bellamy knew from experience to pay attention when she did that, because otherwise, he wouldn't be able to keep up.

“You _did_ tell me about it. Just...not _you_ you.”

Now it was Raven who looked lost, but Clarke spoke up with dawning comprehension. “Are you talking about the game?”

Madi shrugged and looked down again, embarrassed. Clarke looked at the rest of them. “It's a game she used to play when she was little. She takes the pictures down from the van and makes them... talk to each other. And to her.” Clarke seemed to hear how strange this sounded, and went on defensively. “It's not like she has normal toys. And I told her so many stories about all of you, it was like you were... well, sort of made-up. Like characters in a book.”

“But you're different in real life.” Madi looked at Bellamy as she spoke. 

“Well, of course they are. They're real people.” Clarke looked, suddenly, sad. “I didn't know you still played the game. Do you have the pictures with you now?”

Without meeting anyone's eyes, Madi reached into the pocket of the jacket she always wore. Bellamy remembered, the first day, how her hand had kept drifting to her pocket. He'd thought she was going for a weapon.

She spread the pictures out in front of her. Monty and Harper, each looking kind and thoughtful, as though they shared one, endlessly gentle, soul. Then Emori and John, standing close, looking off the page in the same direction. Bellamy glanced up and saw John look down and away, while Emori looked reflexively to him. So many things had changed in the past six years... when was the last time they had stood together and seen the world from the same perspective?

Madi kept going, smoothing the paper out carefully. Echo, in her war paint. When he saw it, Bellamy smiled. Clarke had captured something about her that he would never have been able to put into words. She was staring straight from the page out at the world, fearless. Unapologetic. But Clarke had managed, too, to show something nameless and vulnerable. The Echo that he had come to know on the Ring... how had Clarke seen her so clearly all along?

He looked up at Echo, wanting to share this with her, but she cleared her throat and looked away. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought she was blinking away tears - but Echo didn't cry.

Raven was next, shining so brightly on the page that Bellamy could understand how Madi could have gotten confused about what was real and what was fake. “Wow,” he said.

“Clarke said I should be like her when I grow up.” Madi spoke without emphasis, but Bellamy could feel Raven glance up, sharply, at Clarke, who looked away.

Raven blinked, and looked back down at the page. “Good advice.” Her tone betrayed no emotion.

One last paper. Bellamy held his breath, aware of how revealing the other drawings had been, whether or not they were intended to be. But when Madi unfolded the drawing of him...

Jesus. No wonder the kid was so scared of him.

The man in the drawing, his face half hidden in shadow, was looking down and away from the viewer. But the lines on his face were hard and impassive, his jaw set, the curly hair falling low over the furrowed brow. He looked simultaneously angry and blank. A stranger that no one would ever want to know. Something, he imagined, like how he might have looked when they first stepped off the Dropship. Before he had changed - before _she_ had changed him. Was that how she still saw him?

He tried to make his tone light, even though his heart had dropped down to the pit of his stomach. “Couldn't have picked something a little more flattering?”

Madi frowned at him, not understanding the joke. “This is the only picture of you.”

His heart, already having gone to ground, whimpered and stopped beating for good measure. “Ah.”

The others turned to Clarke, clearly seeking an explanation. He wanted to spare her this, to explain that he could understand that she hadn't felt like drawing the person whose job it was to keep her alive and who had, instead, left her alone on a dying planet. But in order to do that, he would have to talk, which would require breath. And that would require his heart to start beating again.

She looked at everyone but him. “I, uh... had a hard time getting the eyes right.”

“No shit. Not smoldering enough?” John arched an eyebrow.

“Yeah, something like that.” Finally, she looked at Bellamy, and the apology in her eyes only made it worse. He tried to tell her, silently, that he understood, but their old telepathy seemed to be letting him down.

“Look, I know there's probably a lot about this that I don't understand, but is someone going to tell me how carrying around drawings of you beamed this kid into your heads? Because it's kind of freaking me out.” Ben glanced around the group, his gaze finally coming to rest on Madi. “Can you get in _my_ head?” He leaned back, as though trying to get out of her range. Bellamy was pretty sure it didn't work like that, since she had found them in space.

“No,” said Echo, “she can't. She keeps telling us that it doesn't work like that, but we're not listening. She can't enter your mind, or hear you in hers. She can't do it with Clarke, or with anyone else, except for the seven of us. The Flame allows communication with the _commanders._ We thought we knew what that meant - that we knew who the commanders were. The Grounders' commanders. _My_ commanders, the ones I was raised to believe in, going all the way back to Becca.

"But my commanders aren't Madi's commanders. Are they, Madi? So she can't talk to them. And she can't talk to you, Benjamin, or you, Clarke, because you're not her commanders, either.” She fixed Madi with an unyielding, icy gaze. Madi met and held it. “ _We_ are. Spacekru. Isn't that right, Madi?”

****************

“Look, we don't mean we're her _literal_ commanders. We're not crazy.” Raven had caught on quickly, and was trying to explain to the others. As far as Echo was concerned, that seemed to be kind of a lost cause.

“Are you sure? Because you _sound_ fucking crazy.” Murphy was surfacing most of the objections, but Echo knew he was just saying what everyone else was thinking. She tried for what seemed like the hundredth time to explain what had, to her, suddenly been so obvious she couldn't believe they hadn't seen it before.

“Look, in the past, the person who's taken the Flame has always been prepared for it, somehow. For the most part, they would have been planning for leadership for most of their life, right? But even if they weren't, they would have spent a lifetime steeped in the history of the commanders – they would have known them as well as they knew their own family. At least, the legends about them.”

“The way that Madi knew the legends about all of us.” Raven seemed to understand it even better than Echo. Maybe it was the remnants of Becca – or maybe it was just that Raven was smarter than all of them put together.

“So you're saying that she was, what, primed to connect with us, even before she knew us? That's pretty farfetched.” Monty, as usual, was trying to be polite. Echo preferred Murphy's objections – at least they were honest. “Plus, she didn't learn anything about us until _after_ she took the Flame.”

“That's why she was alone in … the Underworld, or whatever. Octavia was too, because they hadn't been prepared for it. They hadn't learned about the commanders, so they couldn't summon them when they needed them. Instead there was just this empty space in their brain.” Echo wanted to keep up with Raven. It was a point of pride.

“Ready to be imprinted upon.” Clarke surprised her by helping.

“Exactly. Or... sort of, exactly. It seems like there are some rules, or something, about who can – imprint?” It was as good a word as any.

“Right. There must be a reason that Madi attuned – imprinted, vibed, whatever – with us, instead of with Octavia or Clarke. It seems like they would be more likely candidates.” Raven sounded frustrated, as she always was when she couldn't solve a problem fast enough.

“Octavia did show up, sometimes. Not often.” Madi spoke up quietly.

“Octavia _was_ in the stories.” Now Clarke seemed as invested as they were in putting the pieces together. The others continued to stare. “But the Octavia I told Madi about was....”

“The old Octavia.” Octavia, like Madi, spoke quietly. “Not the way she'd known me.”

Echo turned to the girl. “The Octavia in your head, was she like the one you knew? Or was she... different?”

“Different. More like in the stories.” Madi was too loyal to specify how, but Echo could imagine that the fragmented shell that they had found in the Store bore no resemblance to the force of a woman in Clarke's stories.

“So it's people she doesn't know, who she learned about from...”

“From legend.” Echo finished Raven's thought. “Like the commanders.” She punched the knee next to hers - Murphy's, as it happened - triumphantly.

“But _why?_ ” Harper, ignoring Murphy's pained groan, asked plaintively. “We weren't uploaded anywhere. Most of us didn't even take the chip, let alone the Flame. We're not Nightblood, so we wouldn't survive even if we had. And Clarke _did_ take the Flame. So did O. I still don't understand why they wouldn't have become her... commanders.” Harper spoke as if the word was distasteful. Echo remembered that she had been raised with Chancellors, who were freely elected. The idea of an anointed commander had never sat well with many from Skaikru.

“Because they were real.” Monty sounded thoughtful. He was coming on board with the theory, which could only help. It felt like it was too crazy for three people to piece out alone – they needed to share it out among as many brains as possible.

“So are we!” Harper still wasn't on board, clearly.

“Real to _her_ , I mean,” Monty clarified. “We weren't. Like Echo said, we were legends. It must be some kind of … I don't know, fail-safe? In the tech.”

“To prevent anyone who takes the Flame from having too much influence on the real people around them. To limit its powers. That does sound like the kind of thing that Becca would think of. She was big on redundancies and kill-switches. ALIE really taught her the dangers of unfettered tech.” Raven could have been talking to herself. “We've been assuming that the power to commune with the commanders is somehow contained in the chip itself. But Clarke, when you took it, the only commander you found was -”

“Lexa,” Clarke finished. “But she _was_ real. Real to me, I mean.”

“But she was already dead. Maybe there's something about that – like, you have enough information about the person to imprint, but they're gone. It's no longer dangerous for you to be able to get inside their head, or vice versa.”

“That would have been necessary, in case the new commander had known the former one,” Echo agreed with Raven. “That happened more often than not. They would have had to be able to contact them, even if they _were..._ 'real' seems like a weird way to put it.”

“Known to them,” Monty offered.

“Sure. Known to them. Death offers the necessary distance.”

Emori was watching them, not offering an opinion. Echo wondered if she was waiting for the rest of them to come to a conclusion, or if her mind was already made up. She was hard to read that way.

Murphy, less so. He held up one hand as if to pause the action, the other still rubbing his knee. “So what you're saying is that the Flame changes your brain somehow. Makes you more...”

“Receptive,” Raven offered.

“Vibed.” It had been Echo's favorite of the options - futuristic. A true Spacekru word.

“Wired. To the universe.” Monty shrugged. “Like a radio.”

“But that would mean that the commanders are already... out there, somehow.” He shook his head. “If the commanders aren't just uploaded in the tech, if they're actually all around us, broadcasting themselves – you get what we're saying, right? That we believe in ghosts.”

“Maybe,” Monty said thoughtfully. “Or maybe that's just the language we use to explain something we don't understand yet. Maybe the commanders _do_ somehow upload their thoughts to the Flame – but what are thoughts? Little sequences of neurotransmitters, right? Becca did a lot with neurotransmitters. Maybe we're all walking around broadcasting electromagnetic patterns generated by the unique patterns of our neurotransmitters and Becca – well, maybe that was what got uploaded onto the Flame. But it's just storing something that already existed – something that can exist without the Flame. Something that maybe _is_ floating all around us, even after we're gone, but that you need special receptivity to hear.” Echo wondered if he was thinking of his friend Jasper.

“So why wouldn't Madi be walking around hearing everyone's thoughts all the time?”

“Because Becca didn't set it up that way. Without the legends, the waves are chaotic and random. Your brain has nowhere to put them, so it screens them out. And the space in your brain that would have received the electromagnetic imprint of the thoughts – or beings, or however you want to think of it – is just blank, like it was for Madi and Octavia. Ready to pick up the first set of electromagnetic waves that makes sense to them – that holds a shape with some meaning to it.”

“Another fail-safe. If people were walking around picking up thoughts that had no pattern – no story, or personality to hang them on – they'd go crazy. We wouldn't have Commanders, we'd have lunatics.” Raven frowned. “But how the hell did Madi pick up our thoughts – and influence them, remember, that's the other half of it – from _space_?”

“My radio,” Clarke whispered. When the others turned to face her, she cleared her throat. “My _radio_. I broadcast a message to you guys... well, most days.” _You guys,_ Echo noted. She would have bet that there was one “guy” in particular that Clarke was broadcasting to, but it seemed petty to bring it up now. “I bet that Madi's contact with your thoughts coincided with my broadcasts. That the radiowaves amplified the thought waves – both hers and yours.”

“The radio waves amplified the thought waves,” Murphy repeated. “Do you _hear_ yourself? Guys, we are so far out on a limb with this, we can't even _see_ the tree trunk. We have no way of proving it – we don't even understand whatever crap you're claiming is science. We're basically saying that taking the Flame means you can talk to ghosts – but only ghosts you don't know in real life. And then, if you happen to _meet_ the ghosts in real life, it's like you cheated the system. You still get to read their minds, but somehow without going crazy.”

“Give me a better explanation.” Bellamy spoke quietly, his eyes downcast. “Give me one single better explanation for any of this – for Madi entering my dream the other day, for everything she knew about us ever since we landed, for my dreams about Clarke -”

“And mine,” Raven offered. “I dreamed about her too.”

“I did, too.” Emori finally spoke, reluctantly. “Not often. But when I did, she didn't look the way used to. She looked the way she does now. How can you explain that?”

Murphy threw up his hands. “Your subconscious brain aged her! It's not rocket science!”

“No,” Bellamy continued. “It's not rocket science. It's _neuro_ science, and none of us understand it. We're not pretending to. But Raven comes the closest. And if she says this is possible, I believe her.”

Now it was Raven's turn to throw up her hands – but it was more of a shrug, or an acknowledgment of helplessness. “I don't _know_ if it's possible. But – how can I explain this? It _feels_ like Becca. It appears one way – that the magic is in the tech – but it turns out that it's in the brain itself. That the tech is just the instrument to use our own brains... not against us, exactly, but in _spite_ of us. It's just so Becca to do something that we think is inhuman, but which turns out to be _more_ human than what we think of as human.” She shook her head in frustration. “I'm not explaining this well, but I can feel her. Like she's _my_ commander. She won't leave, not completely. And I don't think... I don't think that's just my imagination. I think she did something to my brain – changed it, so that she could stay. And right now, I can feel that we've got this right.” She shrugged. “Believe me or don't.”

Emori didn't have it in her _not_ to believe Raven. She was nodding before the other woman finished.

“Besides,” Emori threw a withering look at Murphy. “I don't _have_ one of those – whatever you said. Subconscious brains. I think that must be something only Skaikru gets.” She wrinkled her nose. “It sounds gross.”

“It is,” Murphy sighed. “It really is.”

“OK, Mads. You have a superpower.” Clarke turned to the girl, who looked up for the first time since she had last spoken. Her shoulders had been bowed, her hair hiding her face, but at Clarke's matter-of-fact tone, she straightened up. She must have been terribly worried, Echo realized. She glanced at Bellamy, and understood. It was hard to know something that everyone around you seemed blind to.

“I have _something,_ ” Madi agreed. “I don't know how to use it, though.”

“That's OK.” Murphy, so dead-set against the concept a moment ago, was quick to reassure her now. “We'll figure it out.”

“We'd better.” Bellamy, again, spoke quietly. Echo wondered if it bothered him to realize how profoundly this little girl had impacted all of them – or if he was still sulking about Clarke's drawing of him. She had been startled by it, herself. It made him look cruel. He was many, many things – not all of them good – but she had never known him to be cruel. “Because I think Madi might be our only hope of getting Wonkru out of that bunker.”

****************

 

 


End file.
